


Forgiveness

by LemmingDancer



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Families of Choice, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Whump, Hopeful Ending, Insomnia, M/M, Misunderstandings, Not the porn you're looking for, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Recovery, Suicide Attempt, Unless you're into soft bois being soft, Victim Blaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:21:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 36,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27128479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemmingDancer/pseuds/LemmingDancer
Summary: Geralt and Jaskier's budding romance is just starting to unfurl when Geralt is forced to trade his own pain for the bard's safety. Geralt represses, Jaskier misunderstands, and Eskel picks up the pieces. A frantic cry for help will test Geralt's fragile new normal, forcing him to find his feet or risk losing an entire region of the continent, his family, and his life.
Relationships: Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher), Eskel/Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 290
Kudos: 308





	1. Processing Pain

**Author's Note:**

> First, please mind the tags and be considerate of your own mental and emotional health. While the sexual assault in the first chapter is in NOT graphically described, it occurs on screen and is the inciting incident that propels this story. And it does get worse before it gets better. 
> 
> I wrote this to challenge recovery tropes. In this story, victims are still themselves, family doesn't always know how to help, love doesn't magically fix everything, and recovery isn't a straight line. And yet, everyone manages to get better anyway. 
> 
> Pairings-wise, there is slightly more Geralt/Eskel than Geralt/Jaskier, but Jaskier does feature heavily in later chapters. Aiden/Lambert develops late in the game. The whole fic is written, will update every few days as I edit.

“I don’t want to do this, Jaskier,” Geralt said as the footman took their cloaks.

“Yes yes, I know. You’re an antisocial ogre who hates fun.” The bard smoothed non-existent wrinkles from his sleeves.

“That’s not why.” In truth, he had a bad feeling about the whole evening, from the invitation delivered by a sneering messenger to the nervous fidgeting of the many guards lining the entryway.

“This is my job, Geralt.” Jaskier turned to Geralt and put his hands on his hips. “I know your job is more important. Killing things, saving people…it’s hard and it’s heroic. But I do my job to make yours easier. You must let me.”

Geralt studied Jaskier’s face, his suspiciously wet eyes. He really believed that Geralt didn’t understand how he smoothed the witcher’s way in the world with his bright smiles and kind words. Geralt could hardly blame him.

This summer had brought a change to their dynamic. Geralt tentatively allowed a friendship built on years of mutual pining to tip towards romantic, but their new relationship was bird-bone fragile, so easily crushed by Geralt’s killing hands. It would take more than a few weeks rolling around in each other’s arms before either of them trusted it fully.

Giving in with as much grace as he could muster, Geralt took Jaskier’s arm. The bard beamed at him and drew him into the crowded ballroom.

“The duke’s household is the center of the social scene for leagues around, an audience of unprecedented size to hear tales of your epic battles, your tragic romances. Don’t make a scene.” Jaskier winked at Geralt to take the sting out of his words, then bowed respectfully to their host.

The hair on the back of Geralt’s neck rose. The duke was a thickset man, heaped with golden chains and expensive fabrics. Yet more guards flanked him, including a captain Geralt recognized. They’d shared drinks at the local tavern last night, trading stories of monsters and men while Jaskier sang. The young captain had the cultured accent of the aristocracy and the lowly station of a younger son. The skin around his mouth was green.

Jaskier drew Geralt back and across the dance floor to the stage.

“Wish me luck,” he said as Geralt boosted him up.

“You need none,” Geralt responded. Jaskier was radiant like this, drawing around himself a glamor of confidence as strong as any magic. He tucked the bard’s brilliant smile close to his heart and melted into the crowd at the edge of the room

The duke (Geralt hadn’t bothered to learn his name) certainly threw a celebration worthy of the social center of the region. Clean-burning torches lit the vaulted room, casting a warm light on the hundreds of guests swirling around the dance floor in perfumed silks. Tables laden with luxuries lined the walls, adding rich food smells, fat and spice and char, to the air. Harsh laughter and shouted arguments rang off the marble floor and echoed to the rafters. The confusing jumble of scents and sounds battered Geralt’s senses, but to a human it must be a dreamlike vision of indulgence. 

Their host was little interested in his own decadence. The duke’s eyes, too small in his puffy face, ticked back and forth between Geralt and Jaskier with no regard for the line of people being presented to him.

The feeling of being hunted intensified. Geralt had been prey often enough to recognize the pulse of fear shooting through his gut. That was why the mages had left them with vestigial feelings, after all. The mind instinctively registered danger as fear, safety as happiness. Those stunted flashes of emotion might be the difference between life and death.

Several hours later, just as Jaskier was preparing to take his first beak (“I must rest my voice as surely as you must rest your sword arm, my dear witcher.” “I don’t need to—” “You do, though. You really do.”), the captain of the guard pushed his way into the empty space around Geralt.

“The duke commands you attend him,” the man said. The green around his mouth had expanded, turning his whole face a sickly color. “Your bard will be watched in your absence.”

Adrenaline slammed into Geralt’s veins at the thinly veiled threat, but his hand did not twitch towards his blades. They’d let him keep them, ostensibly so he could protect the party from any bruxa that might remain after he’d cleared out the local nest. He was beginning to suspect the gesture was part of some game the duke was playing.

The captain turned and walked away without waiting to see if Geralt would follow.

Geralt glanced up at Jaskier. They could still leave and turn this ball into a bloodbath if the duke tried to stop them. But that probably counted as making a scene.

Grinding his teeth, Geralt followed the captain back to the duke.

Up close, the man was undeniably corpulent, his girth partially disguised by the artful drape of his elegant brocade robe. His bald head shone; a glistening wyvern’s egg of pasty skin perched in a nest of neck folds. When he gestured Geralt closer, the witcher was hit by the stench of the man’s body: old sweat, mold, and musky lust.

“Your bard is a pretty thing,” he whispered in Geralt’s ear.

Geralt did not growl.

“He sings so, so prettily,” the duke continued, licking his greasy lips. “I wonder, does he hold a tune when you fuck into him? Or does he just scream?”

Geralt did not lash out.

“Would he sing for me?” the duke mused. “Would he scream for me?”

“You will not find out,” Geralt promised with steel in his voice. He counted a dozen armed men along the walls, easily dispatched. The dozen around Jaskier’s platform were the problem; Geralt didn’t know if he could incapacitate them before they got to the bard.

“I think you are wrong, witcher,” the duke said. “You may be the warrior, the mutant, but I hold the power here.”

Geralt allowed his lips to peel back from his teeth. The duke’s fleshy throat was within his reach, he could snap the man’s neck before he gave any signal.

The duke rocked back in his chair slightly, expression delighted. “You’re right, you could kill me. And no doubt you would survive the ensuing chaos. But would the bard? And if he did, would he survive the manhunt? Will he thank you for it, for ruining his life?” He waved his meaty hand at Jaskier.

Jaskier had finished his set and was looking across the room with a deep furrow between his brows. Geralt tried to smile at him but only managed a snarl.

Laughing, the duke leaned into Geralt’s space again, his lips tickling the shell of the witcher’s ear. “Or we can arrive at an agreement that guarantees everyone gets what they want.”

“I will not give him to you.”

“But you will give yourself in his place.”

The noise of the room dimmed in Geralt’s ears, as if coming from a great distance. The duke was not the first to want this of him, he would not be the first to take it against Geralt’s will. His Path often crossed with powerful, bored mages and aristocrats, people already accustomed to using Geralt as a tool who delighted in testing the limits of his body. It hurt less if he let his mind drift.

“You scream for me,” the duke said, “And the bard won’t have to.”

“I do not scream.” He did, he had, but not for a long time.

“Two hours. You will give me two hours to prove you wrong, and you will walk away with your life.”

“The bard,” Geralt said, because they weren’t bargaining for Geralt’s life.

“I swear I will not harm the bard; you have my word as a noble lord of Redania.”

Geralt’s eyes cut to the captain of the guard. The man nodded once, little more than a twitch of his chin, but it was enough. The duke would keep his word.

“Say ‘I want you to punish me, your grace’,” the duke hissed in Geralt’s ear.

“I want you to punish me, your grace,” Geralt repeated, injecting a century’s worth of practiced, bored indifference into his tone.

The duke’s eyebrows clicked together. He put a possessive hand on the small of Geralt’s back, just above the swell of his ass, and steered him towards the dark doorway behind his chair.

Geralt did not look back at Jaskier. He wouldn’t be able to walk away if the bard looked at Geralt with even a hint of his usual softness.

There would be no room for softness with the duke.

* * *

When the edges of Geralt’s vision began to blur from lack of oxygen, he remembered relearning how to swim after the trials, after the mages finished experimenting on his body.

Vesemir had led him and Eskel to a mountain lake high above Kaer Morhen and commanded that they dive in. The water was so cold, so clear. The shock of it on his newly sensitive skin was almost enough to make Geralt gasp, to suck in a lungful of water and choke on it. Almost.

“To the other side,” Vesemir ordered, “Under the surface.”

They dove as one, striking out with strong strokes across the lake. The water didn’t burn Geralt’s eyes, the lack of air didn’t burn his lungs. He reveled in the strength of his body, the curls and eddies of water dancing across his bare skin. Even when his vision began to tunnel, he felt no pain. The need to breathe did not overwhelm his reason.

Geralt beat Eskel to the other side and surfaced in an explosion of spray, the droplets falling back into the lake with ringing little pings.

Eskel had already surfaced at his back. Scooping his arm through the water, he splashed Geralt. 

“We lived,” he said with a booming laugh that echoed off the mountain peaks.

Geralt knew he wasn’t talking about their swim across the lake. The bubbling beneath his breastbone mirrored Eskel’s joy, but the emotion got twisted around on the way to his face, turning into a scowl and a feral snarl.

He swam away rather than watch Eskel’s face fall at his reaction, again.

A splash of tepid water dumped over Geralt’s head brought him back to himself, naked and on his knees at the duke’s feet. The captain of the guard held the dripping bucket.

“You are not nearly as much fun as I was expecting,” the duke told Geralt as he dug his thumb into the sore hinge of Geralt’s jaw.

The man wrenched him to his feet by his hair.

Geralt’s hands were unbound, his swords were leaning against a table nearby. He could overwhelm the duke easily, subdue the captain of the guard and make his escape. But Jaskier was still out there, surrounded by the duke’s guards. Geralt could not resist the duke without risking Jaskier.

He forced himself to stay limp, let himself be slammed face down on the table with his legs hanging off the side.

“Count each hit,” the duke ordered. Geralt heard the whistle of the flogger cutting through the air long before the blow landed.

“One,” he said, voice flat.

This man wanted his pain. Geralt wished he could give it and be done, but his skin would be in tatters long before he managed a reaction that would satisfy the sadist behind him.

As he counted blows like a man counting change in the market, Geralt wondered if other witchers felt as he did, as if the part of his brain that connected his feelings to his body’s reactions had been mangled by the trials. Did their skin twitch when they wanted to writhe, did their sobs come out as snarls?

Probably not. Eskel still loved with the same open-handed, innocent passion he’d had as a boy.

He still cared for Geralt in ways he did not deserve.

Last winter Geralt had arrived at Kaer Morhen with a tangled knot of confused misery lodged in his chest. He bit his own lips bloody the first day, gnashing his too-sharp teeth during their polite sparring session.

Eskel cocked his head to the side, teasing Geralt with an imitation of his own mute head tilt. He winked. “Come at me then, oh great white wolf.”

Geralt snarled as the last shreds of his control dissolved. He threw himself at Eskel, his blade flashing as brightly as Eskel’s signs, and made every attempt to batter himself senseless on the unflinching solidness of this man he loved but did not know how to love.

“Gods Geralt, take it easy!” Lambert shouted from the edge of their whirling blades.

Eskel just grinned, the scars on his cheek twisting his lips into a knot on one side of his face that Geralt wanted to kiss. He aimed the pommel of his sword at it instead and slammed down hard. Eskel’s Quen shattered with enough force to tear the sword from Geralt’s hand, but the momentum from his swing slammed him straight into Eskel’s chest. He put both arms around the other witcher to pull himself inside his guard. Burying his nose in Eskel’s neck, he held on with all his strength.

“Wait, is he trying to crush you to death with his arms?” Lambert asked.

“I think…I think it’s a hug.” Eskel tapped one of Geralt’s shoulder pauldrons. “Just checking, we’re hugging now, right?”

Geralt frowned into Eskel’s pulse point. “Yes?”

Eskel snorted and wrapped his free arm around Geralt’s waist. Geralt grunted something vaguely appreciative and shifted his arm so the spikes on his gauntlets weren’t jabbing the back of Eskel’s neck.

“You guys are fucked up,” Lambert said. His footsteps retreated from the courtyard.

A shudder rippled through Geralt. He clung to Eskel like a drowner clawing its way out of the sand.

“What’s wrong?” Eskel asked eventually. He sheathed his sword in a graceful motion and wrapped his other arm around Geralt’s shoulders.

“I. You.” Growl. He applied a little more crushing strength to the…hug.

Eskel wiggled in his arms. “Yeah, I know. I…you…too. But that’s not exactly news, is it? What’s changed?”

“Jaskier.”

Geralt could hear the click of Eskel’s startled blink. “Huh. That’s not really surprising either. I think he cares about you, if the songs are any indication.”

“You understand.” Jaskier would _not_ understand, he hadn’t spent a century interpreting Geralt’s muted and crisscrossed signals, didn’t know the person trapped under all the mutations.

“Give him a chance to learn.”

Geralt loosened his hold on Eskel and drew back. The open affection on Eskel’s face made Geralt’s throat tight, made it hard to breathe. Very slowly, he brought his hand up and traced Eskel’s scars with his gloved fingers. Eskel’s breath hitched like it hurt, but he leaned into the touch. Geralt gave in and kissed Eskel’s snarled lip, swallowed his quiet whimper.

They didn’t do this, they fucked often enough, but they didn’t do tenderness. Geralt didn’t know how, didn’t even know he wanted to try until Jaskier.

“There’s enough of you to share.” Eskel whispered against his lips. He tugged gently on Geralt’s medallion. “You’re a good man, Wolf. Stop beating yourself up for it. Just stop.”

“Stop! Your grace, please stop!”

Geralt frowned at the sudden lack of motion behind him. The pain had faded into little more than a sensation of wetness and pressure, his mutations protecting him from the screaming of flayed nerves until the danger passed.

“You’re just going to kill him, sir.”

Risking a look over his shoulder, Geralt blinked. The captain of the guard stood between him and the duke.

“You’re defying me to protect this monster?” Spit flew as the duke raged.

“No, no. I’m protecting you. People know he’s here; they’ll notice if he disappears.”

“And who will care?”

“The bard, at least. Considers the creature his muse, doesn’t he? He’ll be sure to make a fuss if the witcher disappears like a Novigrad whore.”

The duke’s watery eyes met Geralt’s. “A Novigrad whore, eh?”

Geralt turned his face away again, pressing his forehead to the rough wood of the table beneath him. He did not react to the duke’s hand dragging through the torn skin on the back of his thigh and then higher.

As the man moved above him, Geralt concentrated on the grind of his hips on the edge of table and thought of Jaskier’s hand catching on that crest of bone. Jaskier, who was safe and not here.

It was getting harder to will himself away now, the pain and the blood loss screaming for attention, his whole body coiled to fight when it must submit, but imagining his return to Jaskier was as comforting as his memories of Eskel.

Clenching his fists at his sides, Geralt set his teeth and endured.


	2. Misunderstandings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaskier is insecure, Eskel doesn't know how to help, and Geralt suffers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: victim blaming, depression, insomnia, bad relationship with food.

Geralt did not know where he was when he next rose to full consciousness. He had dim memories of pain and cold, his mind already wrapping those in a hazy film to cushion the sharp edges, but he must have lost more blood than he’d realized. Or he’d hidden himself too deeply in his own mind.

He listened hard, casting his awareness out and catching the tail end of a whispered conversation in the next room.

“…not sure how it has survived this long.”

“He’s a witcher, few know anything about their kind.” He recognized that voice, the friendly captain.

“His Grace will flay your backside to match the creature’s if he hears you’re sheltering it.”

“It’s only until he can move himself. And His Grace won’t be hearing about it, will he?”

A gusty sigh. “Not from me.”

“You’re a treasure of a man, healer.”

Healer? Geralt shifted his limbs, testing his body. He was loosely clothed and face down on the bottom bunk in a small barracks room; he could smell the homey scent of well-oiled steel and leather. It almost covered the stench coming from Geralt’s body. The skin on his lower back, ass, and thighs was tight and itchy, a sure sign his accelerated healing was working quickly to close torn skin. Ghosting his fingers over the wounds, he found neat bandages covering them.

A hiss yanked his attention to the open doorway.

“Don’t tamper with those,” the captain ordered, kneeling at Geralt’s side. The witcher stilled his instinctive reaction to yank away.

“Got a name?” Geralt asked as the captain fussed with the light blanket drawn over his back.

“Mikel.”

“I have nothing for you, Mikel.”

“And I have asked for nothing.”

“Hmm.”

“But I’d be obliged if you were well enough to remove yourself by dark. Healer says you should be dead, so I figure you’ll just about be able to manage it.”

Geralt snorted, then winced at a new thought. “My swords?”

“Here.” Mikel dragged his hand up to where his swords were laid across the width of the bed just above his head. “Rest now.”

With a grunt, Geralt dropped into light meditation. The position was wrong for it, but it would be a few days before he could even consider putting pressure on his wounds by kneeling. Or sitting.

He slipped out of the guardhouse as soon as the sun set, but he didn’t go immediately to the inn room he’d shared with Jaskier two (or three?) nights ago. He couldn’t bear the thought of returning to the bard smelling of another man’s spend, so he broke into a public bathhouse, scrubbed himself until the water in the tub was too red to see through, re-dressed his wounds and pulled on his borrowed clothes while still wet. Mikel’s uniform fit him poorly, baggy around his lean hips and tight across his shoulders, but at least no one looked at him twice in the duke’s colors.

At the threshold to their room, Geralt stopped and inhaled deeply, scenting nothing but Jaskier: silk and soap and chamomile oil. He opened the door and slipped inside.

Jaskier was awake and sitting up against the headboard with his arms crossed over his chest.

Geralt reached for him before the door had shut behind him fully.

“Jask.” The word was torn out him, involuntary as a scream.

“Here he is, our conquering hero returns to reclaim his fair maiden at last,” Jaskier said through gritted teeth.

Geralt faltered to a stop at the foot of the bed. “What?”

“Just celebrating that you have deigned to return to me! I guess I should have expected this; you're always finding new ways to push me away.”

“I don’t understand, Jaskier.” He wanted to collapse with his face buried in his lover’s neck, wanted Jaskier to wrap him up in his arms. He wanted to pretend the bard could protect him. 

“I saw you sneak out of the ball with the duke’s hand on your ass.”

“That’s not what happened. I didn’t sneak anywhere.”

“You know, that is true. You looked me right in the eye, snarled at me like I’d wronged you, and then walked out with him, brazen as a two-penny strumpet.”

Or a Novigrad whore. “It’s not what you think.”

“Really? That’s the best you can manage? It’s not what I think?” His voice climbed an octave with each question.

Geralt clutched at the footboard to stay upright. The giddy relief of seeing Jaskier safe had twisted into something darker in the face of the bard’s attack. “That’s what you say when you’re caught with your pants around your ankles.”

“It’s your pants we’re talking about now, Geralt. Except those aren’t your pants, are they? Those aren’t even the duke’s pants, they’re some sort of guard uniform!”

“The captain of the guard. Mikel.”

“Oh ho! You’re on a first name basis with the captain as well, now. I guess that’s good, since you’re wearing his fucking pants. Did you have fun at least?”

He scowled. “ _No_.”

“That’s right, you don’t have fun. I’m sorry, I forgot.”

The buzzing in Geralt’s skull was making it difficult to follow the conversation. He wondered how long it had been since he’d had any water or food. It was too long, given the blood loss. 

“It’s not what you think,” he repeated dumbly.

“You want to know what I think Geralt?” Jaskier got to his feet and stalked into Geralt’s space. He jabbed his index finger into the witcher’s sternum to punctuate his question.

“I don’t,” Geralt said. He hurt, he hurt somewhere deep inside, and Jaskier was supposed to understand. Jaskier was supposed to be safe. Whatever words he was winding up with would only poison the last of that illusion.

“I think you took the easy way out, Geralt. I think you didn’t even try to resist him.”

“Hmm.” Maybe it was exactly what Jaskier thought after all.

Jaskier shook his head, looking nauseous. “The guards told me what happened. You could have fought for us, but you gave in to him instead. And I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you.”

The words dropped like stones between them.

“I don’t think I ever will either.” He had tried so hard to do the right thing, to be the person Jaskier needed, and instead he’d sullied himself beyond redemption. And he’d been fool enough to think the bard would overlook his failure.

“You can find another bed to share tonight, I trust.”

Geralt forced himself to unclamp his fingers from the footboard, his fingernails leaving eight neat halfmoons in the wood.

His traitorous hands reached for Jaskier’s shoulders.

“No, Geralt.” The bard shimmied away from him as if he were contagious. “I don’t think I can bear to touch you now, ok?”

His words punched Geralt’s gut hard enough to force a grunt past his wooden lips. “Ok.”

Geralt retreated to the stable before he could inflict any more of himself on the bard.

Roach did not flinch back from his touch at least. He sagged against her shoulder with his face hidden in her coarse mane, the familiar scent of horse and leather slowly grounding him. When his hands stopped shaking, he dropped into the cleanish straw at the back of her stall and fell asleep curled on his side.

Jaskier was knelt in front of him when he woke; the sunlight streaming in the window painted highlights into his hair. He reached towards Geralt’s cheek and then dropped his hand without touching it.

“Fucked this up somehow, didn’t I?” Geralt asked. He knew his failure to fend off the duke had ruined him in Jaskier’s eyes, but he couldn’t understand why the bard seemed so hurt by it. And he didn’t have the strength to examine it any closer. He had to scrape himself together enough to get them home for winter.

“Yeah, yeah you did.” Last night’s anger was gone from his expressive voice, leaving behind wistful sadness. “Listen Geralt, I know I was supposed to come to Kaer Morhen to meet your family, but I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore.”

Geralt grunted. He wanted to shut his eyes and hide behind his eyelids, but he’d said enough goodbyes over the decades to know this would be the last time he saw Jaskier.

The bard’s eyes were mountain-sky blue, still wet with a film of tears. Geralt burned the image into his mind, knowing as he did that it would offer more torment than comfort in the coming months.

“I’ll see you around, I guess,” Jaskier said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

Jaskier frowned at his flat tone but didn’t argue. Geralt listened to his footsteps fading into the distance until he could no longer discern them from the other traffic on the street.

And then Jaskier was gone, taking a piece of Geralt with him. 

* * *

It had been raining sheets of frozen sleet for three days by the time Geralt reached Kaer Morhen a month later. He arrived last; late enough that the other three wolves came down to the outer courtyard to greet him despite the rotten weather.

When he tried to rein in Roach at the stable, she took the bit in her teeth and marched straight up to Eskel. She slammed her head into his chest hard enough to stagger him and then bucked, throwing Geralt over her shoulder and straight into Eskel’s arms.

“Your horse is as antisocial as you are,” Lambert said with a bark of laughter.

Eskel held him in a blissfully tight embrace as Geralt shook like a newborn foal, the force of it rattling his swords in their sheaths.

“Wolf? I smell blood.”

The whip wounds should have closed by now, they should be fully healed, but he hadn’t been able to keep any of his healing potions down and he’d had a lean month. The only contracts he’d seen on his way north were offered by mages and noblemen and he was too weak to risk contact with anyone more powerful than a village alderman. And the last village alderman hadn’t seemed too trustworthy either. Between the lack of nutrition and the constant riding, he hadn’t healed. He was starting to think he’d never heal.

Geralt opened his mouth to try and explain but couldn’t get anything past his chattering teeth.

“Where’s the bard we’ve heard so much about?” Vesemir asked.

“Lover’s quarrel?” Lambert needled. Roach bit his bicep hard when he reached for her reins, because she was a good girl, the best girl. “Or did you let that famous libido of yours lead your dick to greener pastures?”

Clenching his teeth, Geralt forced out an answer. “Fucked up. Didn’t fight hard enough. He left.”

“That doesn’t answer any of our questions. But I’m mostly wondering about the blood.” Eskel eased him to his feet and wrapped one hand around Geralt’s medallion, a gesture as intimate as any of Jaskier’s heated touches.

Geralt knuckled the worried crease between Eskel’s eyebrows in answer. _I’ll be fine. I’m home now._

“There’s blood all over your saddle, you sloppy freak.”

“Lambert!” Vesemir’s voice cracked like a whip.

“Wolf?” Eskel asked. He reached to cradle the side of Geralt’s neck, and Geralt wanted to sink into the comfort, but Eskel’s rain-slicked gloves felt clammy against his skin, the touch of his thumb over the hinge of Geralt’s jaw felt too like another’s touch. Geralt shrank back with wounded snarl.

Eskel took a step away from Geralt, emotions skittering across his face too quickly for Geralt to interpret when most of his mind was just keening from the withdrawal of contact. What the fuck was wrong with him, snapping at the hand he most craved on his skin?

“Get yourself cleaned up, son,” Vesemir said. “We’ll handle Roach.”

It was a dismissal, not as final as Jaskier’s but just as firm. Geralt wandered up to his room and lay down on his dusty bed. He hadn’t spent much time here last winter, not after Jaskier had torn open his heart and he realized Eskel was still there inside. They’d slept in Eskel’s room every night, with Eskel molded around Geralt’s back, whispering secrets they could ignore in the light of day.

This wasn’t the first time word of Geralt’s raunchier escapades had reached Kaer Morhen and disrupted the delicate balance between them, but everything had changed now. Eskel must know that the sex Geralt had on the Path, even the sex he’d chosen to have, meant nothing compared to the bond between them. 

And if he didn’t, well, Geralt had all winter to convince him.

* * *

Geralt didn’t think he could do this anymore.

Eskel avoided him for weeks, starting with the very first dinner after his return.

Normally he and Eskel sat side by side at the table, but he insisted Geralt take the bench closer to the fire.

Lambert’s bench.

“But he still stinks,” Lambert said when Eskel hip checked him back to Geralt’s side of the table.

Geralt sniffed. He’d cleaned himself in the hot springs, soaking away yellowing scabs and pounds of crusted road dirt. All he could smell now was his body’s usual scent and a faint tang of salt.

“He smells the way he smells,” Vesemir said as he sat at the head of the table, putting an end to the discussion by thunking down a platter full of roasted meat and potatoes.

The sight of the hearty meal turned Geralt’s stomach. Fisting a hand in the shirt over his gut, he breathed through his mouth in a meditative rhythm until he was sure he wasn’t going to wretch bile into Lambert’s lap.

Obviously, Lambert deserved it, but it was too early in the season to start their tit-for-tat slight war.

The other wolves had stopped eating to watch him, three sets of identical predatory eyes.

“Have a portrait done, it’ll last longer,” Geralt ground out at them. He ladled some potatoes and a slice of pork onto his plate, glaring at the perfectly ordinary food his body had no interest in consuming.

“Like an artist would lower their standards enough to paint you, pretty boy,” Lambert said.

“That insult make sense in your head?” Geralt asked.

Throwing his head back, Eskel laughed, his big laugh that warmed the room and rattled the silverware. Geralt’s lips twitched at the sound and he kicked his legs out beneath the table to tangle them with Eskel’s.

Eskel pulled away.

“Forgot my ale,” he said, standing. When he came back with his drink, he sat down on the bench closest to the fire as well, with Lambert between them.

“You’re being weird,” Lambert said. “I mean, I expect it from pretty boy’s bat-infested belfry, but not from good ol’ Eskel, reliable as a plow horse.” 

Geralt punched his left kidney. He wasn’t getting anywhere with his dinner, might as well make the evening interesting. By the time he pinned Lambert, Eskel had disappeared.

*

Eskel liked to soak in the hot springs before training, when Lambert was still sleeping off his most recent alcoholic experiment. Geralt joined him the next morning, slipping between the castle’s square cut foundation stones and into the steamy darkness of the natural caves beneath the mountain. He found Eskel already soaking in one of the hottest pools.

“Wolf,” he said in greeting.

Geralt flashed his teeth at him and stripped. He turned, then bent over to stack his clothes on a bench along the wall. Behind him, Eskel made a strangled noise.

“What?” Geralt asked as he slid into the water, daring Eskel to comment on his wounds. Eskel shook his head wordlessly. His mouth (gods, Geralt missed his mouth) had twisted into a gap-lipped frown.

With a huff, Geralt submerged himself entirely. His body sank easily to the bottom of the pool, where he settled cross-legged on the smooth stone, worn flat by a millennium of witcher feet. He was going to take half a minute to get his thoughts in order, and then they were going to talk about this, like adults. Like Jaskier would have wanted.

Fuck. Jaskier. Geralt missed his mouth too.

When he surfaced, Eskel was gone. 

*

Geralt passed Eskel in the corridor the next morning, then exchanged a few words with him in the stable when he fed Roach her evening grain. He didn’t push his luck, figured he knew where Eskel slept.

At dinner he forced down a crust of bread soaked in wine and considered it a win when it got past the lump in his throat.

He threw it up an hour later, along with the rest of the fluids he’d painstakingly coaxed down one sip at a time. He decided not to knock on Eskel’s door that night still smelling like sick.

*

Lambert broke Geralt’s arm over breakfast.

They’d been arguing about the chore rotation. Lambert tossed an insult in Geralt’s teeth, something about him whoring himself out to Eskel to get all the easy chores, and Geralt snapped. Then Lambert snapped the long bone in his upper arm.

“What the fuck Lambert,” Eskel said. He reached for Geralt’s wrist but drew back as if burned before his fingertips even brushed skin.

“It’s fine,” Geralt said, swallowing down another wave of nausea. His throat was so tight he could barely swallow his own spit; it pooled in his mouth viscously.

Lambert’s looked nearly as sick as Geralt felt. “I swear, I didn’t even twist that hard. It was like dry kindling, pop!”

Geralt considered breaking his nose in retaliation and decided one broken bone a day between them was probably more than enough.

“I’ll get Vesemir,” Eskel said, sprinting from the room.

*

Geralt didn’t see Eskel at all the next day.

Nor the day after that. But he didn’t leave his room at all on that day, so that one was definitely on him.

*

A few nights before mid-winter, Geralt cornered Eskel in the kitchen.

“What the fuck Eskel,” he said, which, not great as opening salvos go, but hey. Geralt hadn’t slept in…he had no idea the last time he’d slept more than a handful of minutes at once. Probably last winter.

“I’m just giving you space,” Eskel said with his hands raised.

“When did I ask for space.”

“You need it, whether you asked for it or not.”

Geralt growled and stepped up to Eskel, forcing him up against the wall.

“What are you doing?” Eskel asked as Geralt fisted his hands in Eskel’s loose shirt.

Burying his nose in Eskel’s throat, Geralt leaned his weight on the other man, melding their bodies together from knee to shoulder. Eskel froze against him, barely breathing.

Geralt burrowed deeper into Eskel’s bulk and nibbled at the junction between his neck and shoulder, tasting salt and the sizzle of magic that lay on Eskel’s body like a second skin.

Eskel gasped, wrapping his arms around Geralt loosely with his hands flat on Geralt's shoulder blades. Geralt couldn't repress the shudder that rocked through him at that long-withheld contact. 

"That's why we're not doing this," Eskel said as his hands fell away from Geralt again. Geralt keened at the loss.

"I want this," he whispered into Eskel's skin. How was it possible to miss a person this much when you were pressed together, breathing each other’s breath?

Geralt spun, pushing his back into Eskel’s chest, but Eskel's hands remained stubbornly at his sides. Frustrated with Eskel’s lack of reaction, Geralt ground his ass back against his hips, their clothes delightfully warm where they rasped together.

Eskel shoved him hard. “Stop, Geralt!”

Geralt’s gut clenched painfully. He snapped his arms close to his chest and staggered away from Eskel, wobbling as if he’d been on a three-day bender. Maybe he was crying? He didn’t think he could cry, but the room suddenly wavered around him.

Eskel swallowed audibly. “Just, don’t touch me, ok? Maybe I’m the one who needs space. Just while I figure out what to do, understand?”

He did. He didn’t want to, but he did. Eskel had figured out enough of what happened from Geralt’s reactions and his scars, and now he didn’t want Geralt’s touch anymore, just like Jaskier.

It made sense. Geralt had never deserved either of them, his heart too mangled to love them properly, his twisted soul too blackened to touch theirs without tainting their happiness.

Eskel kept talking but Geralt couldn’t really hear him. His was perfectly, blissfully empty.

“Ok,” Geralt said eventually, and Eskel left.

Geralt sat down at the kitchen table. There were a few slices of mild cheese and a loaf of bread on a platter in the center; Vesemir had taken to leaving food around the keep as if being ambushed by lunch in the armory would surprise Geralt into swallowing it. He dragged the offering close and inhaled the smell. His mouth watered, and he tried, he really tried to swallow the edge of one of the cheese slices, but it wouldn’t go down.

He couldn’t do this anymore. He just. Couldn’t.

It was three days until midwinter, he would give himself that time to learn if he could live without them.

Three days to figure out how to sleep without his mind battering itself bloody against his memories. It didn’t have to be good sleep, just better than this, a reprieve from the endless self-recriminations.

Three days to get some food and water down, enough so that he could stand without feeling faint, enough so he could make it down to the stable to lean on Roach.

Three days. And then he would let himself go. 


	3. Ice in his veins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eskel takes action to help a spiraling Geralt, but is he too late?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Suicide attempt, insensitive asshole Lambert, victim...denial I guess? 
> 
> Thanks for your comments and kudos! This is un-beta'd, so we're testing in our production environment here folks. Your feedback makes the fic better :-)

Eskel woke, fully and suddenly, without knowing what had disturbed him. A once-in-a-century storm raged outside the keep, but tucked away in an interior room, Eskel could just hear the wind screaming across the battlements.

He got up to add another log to his fire then settled in the broken-down armchair in front of it. Midwinter, the longest night of the year, and Eskel couldn’t sleep. Typical.

Pulling a book off the stack by his side, Eskel opened it and stared blankly at the text. Instead of reading, he found himself thinking back on a truly bizarre day, in a winter full of them.

It started with an explosion, as it often did when one shared space with Lambert.

“Lambert. The fuck?” Eskel asked. An entire corner of the main hall was blackened and smelled strongly of silver soot.

“Making bombs!” Lambert shouted, sticking one grubby finger in his ear experimentally to check for an intact eardrum.

“I can see that. Why now?”

“Geralt gave me those impact-resistant saddle bags of his I’d been eying.”

“Since when do we do mid-winter gifts?”

“That’s what I said. He said he wasn’t going to need them.”

Geralt had gone through a bomb phase, they all had, but it took a certain type of person to really commit to them. A person like Lambert. Still, they all carried enough dancing stars to destroy monster nests at the very least, and those saddlebags had been a gift to Geralt from an old flame.

“Weird,” Eskel said.

“Gift horses, man, you know not to look.”

“How do you make everything sound dirty?”

“It’s a gift.”

“Where’s Geralt?”

“Probably boiling himself down in the springs.”

The white wolf spent most of his time in the hot springs. Eskel was afraid he’d fall asleep in there and end up with a couple of gallons of mineral water in his lungs, a minor inconvenience for a witcher on a normal day, but probably enough to give Geralt pneumonia at this point. He had gone from lean to outright frail as the winter progressed, and the way he favored his broken arm nearly a month after the injury suggested his body was failing to repair itself as it should.

Geralt was not in the hot springs.

Eskel found Vesemir on the wall, watching the darkening skies.

“Have you seen Geralt?” he asked as stepped up to his mentor’s side.

“Not since breakfast.”

“Did he eat?” The tight skin of Eskel’s scarred cheek itched in the cold, but he resisted the urge to fidget.

“Didn’t even try.” Vesemir shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “He gave me that elven dagger of his, the one he keeps under his pillow.”

“Why?”

“Just said he wanted me to have it.”

They studied the ominous clouds together for a few minutes, until Eskel couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

“We’re losing him, aren’t we?”

Vesemir hummed.

“He can’t eat, he can’t sleep,” Eskel said. “I don’t even understand what’s wrong.”

“You don’t?”

“He’s always been strung differently from the rest of us.”

“Thought you were pretty familiar with his inner workings by this point.”

Eskel winced. “Why is everyone gross today?”

Vesemir’s lips twitched down. He and Geralt shared more than a few mannerisms, among them this grimace-smile that outsiders mistook for a scowl. Eskel hadn’t seen it on Geralt’s face all winter.

“You said we wouldn’t feel fear.” Eskel couldn’t keep the accusation out of his tone. “But I am so fucking terrified for him. What if I do something wrong? What if I make it worse? I don’t know if I can take it; if he recoils from me again.”

“Sounds like you’re terrified for you.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I never said life was fair.” Vesemir quirked an eyebrow at him.

“I had him. For the first time since the trials, he uncurled enough for me to slip under his guard. And then…fuck.” Eskel gnashed his teeth like Geralt sometimes did when chewing on his words. “What did they do to him, Vesemir?”

“I think you know.”

Eskel rubbed his hand across his scars hard, as if he scrub them away if he applied enough force.

Vesemir was right. Eskel knew what had happened to Geralt, the broad strokes of it anyway. The wounds, the flinching back from touch, the blankness in his eyes. It had happened before, Geralt’s big heart getting him into a situation he had to pay his way out of with his body. It twisted him in knots that took years to smooth out, Eskel tiptoeing around on shards of glass while Geralt snapped and snarled. But he always put himself back together again. He always forced himself back into a familiar shape. Eskel just had to keep his hands to himself and wait it out.

“He’s stronger than me,” Eskel said. “Always has been. I don’t understand what changed.”

Turning away from the storm, Vesemir put his hand on Eskel’s shoulder. “You changed. What you mean to him changed.”

Eskel scoffed, looking away.

“Eskel,” Vesemir said, his tone as grim as the foreboding skies. “You might do something wrong. But doing nothing will be worse.”

Now, alone in his room and brooding in front his hearth, Eskel decided he was done with doing nothing.

Eskel dressed, spending ten minutes rooting around under his bed for his missing fur-lined slipper before giving up and pulling on his boots.

He opened his door and blinked at the sight on his threshold. Two sheathed swords lay across the width of his doorway. The silver blade had a studded, angled handguard that looked too familiar.

On top of both in a little puddle of silver chain was a wolf’s head medallion.

Eskel’s heart kicked in his chest. Two swords to mark a witcher’s grave, a medallion delivered home to tell the tale of his fall.

“VESEMIR! VESEMIR! LAMBERT!” Eskel shouted as he ran down the hallway.

Eskel darted up to Geralt’s tower room at full speed. The door at the top of the stairs was shrouded in darkness, no light showed beneath it. Eskel had a moment’s hope that Geralt had finally fallen asleep, that there was some innocent explanation for everything. Then he registered the lack of heartbeat in the room.

Kicking the door open, Eskel shoved his way inside.

Geralt’s room was bare, completely empty of personal effects. Two chests sat in the middle of the room, lids open, with all Geralt’s things tucked away neatly inside.

“VESEMIR!” Eskel shouted again.

Eskel scrambled back down the stairs, slamming into Vesemir on the landing

“He’s gone Vesemir, he’s gone.” Eskel pointed at the swords on the floor in front of his room.

“Gone where?” Lambert asked. “He wouldn’t leave without his swords, he…” Lambert trailed off as he knelt and picked up the medallion. “Fuck.”

“Where would he go?” Vesemir asked Eskel.

A strangled sound worked its way out of Eskel’s throat.

“Come on Eskel,” Lambert said, gripping his shoulder. “You know him best. If you were a batshit crazy uber-witcher looking to off yourself, where would you go?”

Eskel forced himself to breathe past the sudden swarm of images in his mind: Geralt’s snowy hair stained red from a smashed skull, blood pooling around his slashed wrists. But that wasn’t right, it wasn’t consistent with the rest of Geralt’s careful preparations.

“He won’t make us clean up after him,” Eskel said. “Or poison anything we need to survive.”

“So no open wounds, no potion overdosing, and he’s not hanging in the pantry or at the bottom of the springs. Great, now we know where not to look.”

“Shut up, Lambert.” Vesemir said.

The raging of the storm outside pressed against Eskel’s eardrums in the sudden silence.

He and Vesemir came to the answer at the same time.

“He’s outside,” Vesemir spoke for them.

“The crazy fuck. Where?” Lambert bounced on the balls of his feet.

“Somewhere we already associate with death, somewhere we already avoid.” Vesemir turned towards the uninhabited part of the keep.

“The children’s barracks,” Eskel said. “No, the tower above them.” Geralt had always loved heights.

Their frantic race to the tower took forever and was over in an instant. Even in the stinging cold of the unoccupied ruin, Eskel could detect a hint of Geralt’s unique scent, his chemical/animal sharpness tainted by sour sadness and always, even now, undercut by just a hint of horse.

At the top of the tower, a hunched figure was barely visible through the swirling snow, kneeling on the edge of the wall with a two-hundred-foot drop at his knees.

Eskel got to him first and wrapped both arms around his waist. It was like embracing carved ice. He couldn’t hear a heartbeat or feel him breathing. Vesemir and Lambert helped him drag Geralt down, but his knees wouldn’t unlock and his body was stiff.

“No no no no no no no no no.”

“Eskel, hush,” Vesemir said. “Let’s get him back to the main hall.”

“He’s not breathing, old man. He’s not breathing.” But Lambert didn’t hesitate to hook his hands under Geralt’s knees.

Eskel took the weight of Geralt’s chest, holding him close like he’d longed and feared to do all winter.

By the time they arrived back in the main hall, Vesemir had stoked the fire high and gathered a heap of furs in front of it.

“Should we put him in the hot springs to thaw?” Eskel asked.

“The shock would kill him.”

“He’s already dead,” Lambert said.

“Shut UP, Lambert.” The room went blurry and waterlogged.

“Get your clothes off.” Vesemir was already stripping Geralt’s ice crusted nightshirt. He wasn’t wearing anything else, like a novice being led to the trials in as little clothing as possible to avoid getting it soiled. “Eskel you get behind him, Lambert in front.”

“No,” Eskel said. “We can’t strip him naked and hold him down. We just can’t, not now.”

“What? Why?” Lambert asked as he kicked off his boots. “I mean, besides the inherent weirdness of hugging a frozen corpse.”

“He was raped,” Vesemir said.

Lambert scoffed. “Who, Geralt?”

“He put a new region on the blacklist a few days ago. I sent some messages, gathered some information about the man who rules there. Women have been disappearing at his estate for a decade.”

Eskel swallowed bile.

“But Geralt is no woman,” Lambert argued. “He’s too strong and too smart to be hurt like that.”

“Surely I don’t have to explain to you the myriad ways a person can be coerced? That there’s always someone stronger or smarter or more powerful? Or that men can be victims too?”

Lambert was frozen with his hands on the hem of his shirt.

Vesemir smoothed Geralt’s wet hair back from his face and pushed him onto his side by the fire. “He was raped—”

“Stop saying that,” Lambert said.

“—but we are not going to let it kill him. Bring him up to body temperature slowly, that’s our first task.”

Eskel couldn’t argue with that. He stripped mechanically and lay down behind Geralt. Scooping his arm under the other witcher’s sunken waist was an achingly familiar gesture, even though the spine pressed into his chest was colder and sharper than ever before. He laid one palm flat on Geralt’s chest directly over his still heart. Lambert lay down on Geralt’s other side, wrapping his arms around both men and pulling them close to his chest.

“This is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever done, and that is saying something,” Lambert said. His voice had an edge, but it was not his usual anger. Eskel recognized it as the grief looming just around the corner in his own heart.

“This is not the first time his heart has stopped in these walls,” Vesemir said.

“That does not make me feel better, you bastard.”

They waited, Vesemir at their heads with his hand on the blue-white column of Geralt’s neck.

“Eskel, he needs your signs now.”

“What?” The question came out wet with Eskel’s tears.

“You’re going to pump his heart in time to your own, using Aard.”

Lambert choked. “Aard. Eskel’s throw-people-through-walls Aard.”

“He’s got the control. Just a localized pulse.”

Eskel formed the sign over Geralt’s heart with shaking fingers. He met Lambert’s wide eyes over Geralt’s head and Lambert gave him a might-as-well shrug.

His first attempt crushed Geralt back into his chest, so Eskel blinked through his tears and decreased the power of his sign. His second try jolted them both like a firm punch.

“Good, Eskel. Lambert, you breathe for him.”

“Excuse me?”

“Seal your mouth to his and exhale.”

Lambert obeyed with a growl. Eskel prayed to every god he knew, individually and by name, that Geralt would live to tease the youngest wolf about this.

“For how long?” Eskel asked pushing a bit more magic into Geralt’s chest.

“Until he wakes up or one of you passes out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Not an approved use of Aard, but if Netflix can seal a door with witcher magic imma do what I want  
> **Also not a good way to treat hypothermia, probably. But, you know. Witcher mutations. (waves hands)


	4. Respite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Against the odds, Geralt wakes. Conversations are had.

_Eskel_.

An unmoored thought, bone deep certainty.

_Eskel._

The sour scent of sea salt sadness. A thump of pressure against his chest over and over, familiar magic colliding with his sternum, jostling against his medallion. Wetness on the back of his neck.

_Was Eskel crying?_

Calluses rasping across his scars as he struggled. Struggling because struggle was his default state.

“He’s fighting me. He’s not fucking breathing—” White gull fumes on his tongue, his lungs filling involuntarily. “—and he’s fighting me.”

Three heartbeats loud in his ears, arrayed around him with his heart at the center. Skin soft against him, burning bands around his ribcage.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I have to.” Lips against the knobs at the nape of his neck. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” Alcohol burning his nose.

“Hold, both of you,” from above him, looming. Protecting? Both.

Four heartbeats.

Eskel sobbed into his hair. “Thank Melitele. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Geralt. You idiot. You fucking idiot. I’m sorry.”

“Breathe, dumbass.” Lambert flicked his cheek.

Geralt sucked in a startled breath. He stopped his weak struggling and lay still.

Eskel kept crying and apologizing. The last time Geralt had seen Eskel cry was right after the experimental mutations, when he ran his hand through Geralt’s red curls and came away with a chunk of his hair. The rest of it had fallen out by the end of the day and eventually grown back bone white.

He didn’t like being the only thing that could make Eskel cry.

Geralt’s arms were crossed loosely against his chest, crushed between Eskel’s arms and Lambert’s chest. He wriggled his fingers around, knocking against the hot silver of his medallion. When he found Eskel’s enormous hand on his sternum he laced their fingers together.

“I’m going to kill you myself, you selfish fucking fuck.” Lambert’s chest vibrated as he descended into a snarling, profanity-laden rant.

Geralt twisted his other hand until he could lay it over Lambert’s heart. The youngest wolf petered out with a final wordless growl.

Eskel was crying harder, but he had stopped apologizing so Geralt decided to count it as a win.

Blessed unconsciousness swallowed him before he finished the tally of his losses.

* * *

Geralt woke to the same three heartbeats around him, to the same sea-salt sadness thick in the air.

He was lying on his side in his own bed, crushed into the mattress by a stifling number of furs. He could tell without opening his eyes that Eskel now lay in front of him and Lambert was behind. The younger wolf’s heartbeat was faster, his breath lacked the quiet susurration of air that slipped from the corner of Eskel’s ruined mouth. His brothers were beneath the covers with him, their bodies radiating heat.

They were not touching him. Geralt knew why but he didn’t want to remember. The weight of it was too much to bear when his body already felt corpse heavy.

“Was starting to think you weren’t going to wake up,” Vesemir said from his place by the fire.

Neither Lambert nor Eskel stirred. Geralt had a dim flash of memory: pulses of magic crushing his chest endlessly, the taste of Lambert’s alcohol-flavored breath in Geralt’s mouth. They’d worn themselves out bringing him back.

“You were without a heartbeat long enough, there could be damage,” Vesemir said. A chair creaked and footsteps came toward them. Vesemir sat on the side of bed behind Eskel, directly in Geralt’s sightline.

Vesemir raised an eyebrow. “Can you form words, speak?”

“Think so,” Geralt said. His voice cracked like shattering ice.

Eskel stirred, forehead puckering, but quieted when Vesemir rested a hand on his shoulder. Geralt hadn’t seen his mentor’s face so grim since they’d buried the last of Kaer Morhen’s children in the moat.

“You would leave them to walk the Path without you.”

Straight to it then. “We walk different paths. They don’t need me.”

Vesemir didn’t even try to deny it. Geralt hadn’t realized he was hoping for an argument until one wasn’t offered. He clenched his eyes closed.

“The world needs witchers and there are few enough of us left,” Vesemir said instead.

“Fuck the world,” Geralt said without opening his eyes.

Vesemir snorted, surprising Geralt into looking at him. He was smiling, just a bit. It made him look sadder. His fingers tightened on Eskel’s shoulder.

“They want you, then,” Vesemir said. “Whether they need you or not, and I think they do, they want you.”

“Want.” Geralt tasted the word. “Witchers need no one and want nothing.”

“Sounds like one of mine. It isn’t, though, is it? Because I know I told you that if a hunt was too big for one witcher, you need to seek the help of another.”

Geralt frowned. His guiding principle, a distillation of every pain-bought lesson, every betrayal and loss, had he not learned it at Vesemir’s feet?

“Witchers don’t want,” Geralt told his mentor, ignoring the ‘need’ portion of his argument.

“Fuck that.”

Now it was Geralt’s turn to snort. Lambert stirred behind him, rolling to his side and closer to Geralt. He cast one hand out in his sleep, not stilling until it landed on Geralt’s side, a warm, calloused weight.

“Don’t see much point in it,” Geralt whispered into the quiet.

“In what?”

“Wanting what I can not have.”

Geralt had wanted Jaskier, had dared act on it, and had lost everything between them in reaching for what he could never touch. He’d driven himself mad wanting Eskel all winter.

“Might be wrong about what you can’t have,” Vesemir said.

Geralt looked at Eskel’s face so close to his. They both had their arms folded up to their chests, their hands flopped towards each other in the space between their bodies.

Awful hope burned in Geralt’s chest. There was a reason he couldn’t have this, a reason Eskel shied from his touch, but Geralt’s mind continued to skirt around it.

“I ever tell you how Varin died?” Vesemir asked. He pushed himself up the bed until he was leaning on the headboard.

“Pogrom,” Geralt said, grateful for the distraction from his spiraling thoughts. It was easier to think about the slaughter of the last of their kind than deal with his own idiocy, which was disgusting, but Geralt had long ago stopped being surprised by his own repulsive nature.

“Yes, during the fall of the keep. But specifically, have I told you how he died?”

“You are shit at cheering people up.”

“I know. Varin was the best swordsman ever to come through Kaer Morhen. He stood at the gates as the mob broke through.”

“And killed two dozen men before he fell. A fucking hero in the end.” Geralt was surprised by his own venom.

“No. The first or second pitchfork got him. Was trampled to death slowly as he bled out from a gut wound.”

Geralt had never like Varin; he was an arrogant son of a bitch. Still. “Awful. How is this helping?”

“Shut up. Point is, a sword is a shit weapon against a couple hundred pitchforks.”

“Not much use in a hostage situation either,” Geralt said without thinking.

Vesemir flashed his teeth. “You always were smarter than you looked.”

“Thanks,” Geralt said with about half his usual sarcasm. He blinked his burning eyes. Gods he was tired, but at his heart he was still that little red-haired boy that wanted to impress the closest thing he had to a father. Wanted it enough to think about Vesemir’s lesson, to face the reason Jaskier and Eskel wouldn’t touch him anymore.

He had not resisted. He had willingly traded his pain for the bard’s.

And it was the lesser of two fucking evils, by a thousand leagues. He would do it again. Jaskier was the one who didn’t understand that some battles couldn’t be won, that life was not a song and there were no heroes.

“I did what I had to do for us both to survive,” he told Vesemir.

“I know.”

“I…what?”

“You survived, that’s what matters.”

“Then why…?” he twitched his fingers to indicate the whole Varin story.

“That’s not the fight you lost boy.” Vesemir’s eyes narrowed to angry slits as he glared at Geralt over Eskel’s shoulder. “You survived, and then you didn’t. Then you knelt on top of the north tower during a snowstorm until you froze to death.”

Geralt twitched as Vesemir’s palm landed on his cheek. He hadn’t realized he’d closed his eyes.

“Kaer Morhen fell one man at a time,” Vesemir said. “One witcher after another charging into a fight they were ill-equipped to win.”

Swallowing hard, Geralt nodded.

Vesemir’s thumb flexed against Geralt’s cheekbone as if he wanted to trace it. “Don’t make the mistake of dying alone, not when you have me and your brothers to fight at your side.”

“Think this is something we can fight together?” It didn’t feel like it, it didn’t feel like something he could fight at all.

His mentor was quiet for so long Geralt thought he might not answer. The warm softness of his bed and the promise of pain-free oblivion were pulling him under by the time Vesemir finally spoke.

“I don’t know wolf; I wish I did. But I want you here, alive. We all do. So we’ll put new weapons in your hands until we even the odds.”

Geralt couldn’t keep his lips from twitching at that, even as he slid towards sleep. As promises went, it was hardly a guarantee. That was probably why he found it so comforting. Victory was never assured, not really. But in a fair fight, well. He usually held his own.

* * *

The next time Geralt woke he and Eskel were alone. Eskel’s eyes were open but glassy, not looking at Geralt so much as the middle distance somewhere behind his head. They were both still curled towards each other on their sides with their hands not quite touching between them.

“Esk?” Geralt asked.

Eskel’s eyes focused on Geralt’s face. “You killed yourself.”

“Not very well, apparently.”

“Not funny.”

“A little funny.”

“Not at all funny.” Eskel’s hands clenched into fists. “I had to use Aard to make your heart pump, over and over and over, slamming power into your chest in time to my own heartbeat.”

“My heart has always followed yours.”

Eskel blinked at him and scowled, but Geralt could see the blush on his cheeks even in the dim light of the banked fire. “You’ve been spending too much time with that bard of yours.”

Geralt flinched. “Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry.” Eskel chewed his lip. “I didn’t ask. I thought…well. It didn’t work, did it?”

“Uh. No?”

“Yeah, no. Not talking definitely didn’t work. I mean, you killed yourself.”

Geralt sucked in a breath then let it out again without arguing the point. He wasn’t dead, but he hardly felt alive, so maybe some version of himself had died up there in the ice. It wouldn’t be the first time Geralt shed his skin and became a new monster.

“Why?” Eskel’s voice cracked around the word.

Geralt sighed. “I feel like shit.”

“You fucking died.”

“No. Well, yes. But I feel like shit all the time. I just can’t anymore, Esk.” He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t even train. This suspended half-life wasn’t worth in, not when it was only a matter of time before he died anyway, killed by malnutrition or distraction.

“That’s bullshit. You’re the best of us, the strongest.”

Geralt shrugged. “Doesn’t feel that way, from the inside. Feels like something got broken a long time ago and I’ve just barely held the pieces together this long.”

They listened to each other’s breathing without speaking until the last flame in the hearth went out.

Eskel sucked in a breath. “Can you talk about it?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Maybe just…what happened with the bard?”

Shrugging, Geralt focused on the ragged corner of Eskel’s mouth. “He said he couldn’t bear to touch me, so we’d be better off—” he ran out of words.

Eskel hummed. “Doesn’t sound like the man you waxed poetic about last year. Are you sure you understood what he meant? I mean, I think I kinda understand, in a way.”

Geralt nodded. Of course he understood he repulsed them, Eskel hadn’t wanted to share Geralt’s bed this winter until severe hypothermia had forced it on them. “How long before…?” Geralt trailed off.

Frowning, Eskel squinted at him. “Before what?”

“Last time I fucked up, it was decades. Don’t think I’m going to survive that long again without…” Geralt twitched his pinky finger towards Eskel’s.

“Wait, do you _want_ me touch you?” Eskel’s voice was sharp, the way it got when he had figured out what they were hunting. “There’s no wrong answer; it’s ok if you don’t.”

Geralt shrugged, still staring at Eskel’s hands. He wasn’t going to make Eskel do something he didn’t want to do just because he wanted comfort.

“Wolf, look at me.” Eskel’s pupils were almost human round. “It’s ok if you _do_ want me to touch you too.”

One of Geralt’s eyebrows quirked up in disbelief.

“Oh you precious idiot,” Eskel said. He tangled their hands together, clasping Geralt’s too-cold fingers tightly. “Ok?”

Geralt swallowed hard. “More?” he breathed.

Eskel scooped one arm beneath Geralt’s waist and threw the other over his shoulder, clutching Geralt to his chest so fast he squawked like a rusty door-hinge in surprise.

“Still ok?” Eskel asked. His breath tickled the top of Geralt’s head.

Geralt wasn’t sure anything would ever be okay again, but this was so much better than that unbridgeable gap between them. “Better,” he whispered into Eskel’s chest.

They lay silently for a long time. Then Geralt couldn’t help but ask, “Precious?”

“Yes. And yes, I’m going to shout that at you next time we’re sparring in front of Lambert.”

“He’ll give you more shit about it than he’ll give me,” Geralt pointed out.

“Hmph. True.”

Geralt’s hands were smashed against Eskel’s chest. “This is ok?” he dared ask.

“Wolf, I assumed you wouldn’t want me to touch you, not after.” It didn’t sound like he was even going to try to finish that sentence. “And I was afraid to hurt you more. But all I wanted to do was cling…to wrap you up in my arms like, like...”

“Something precious?” Geralt asked drily. He wriggled until Eskel loosened his frantic hold enough for Geralt to get his own arms out and around Eskel in return. “It’s different. That asshole didn’t do this.”

Eskel’s chest rumbled with a subvocal growl. “If you want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”

“Hmm.” Geralt tilted his head as he considered. It would hurt. It would hurt them both, and wasn’t that a new level of bullshit? He had thought he was done being surprised by the way one act of violence could hurt so many people. “Not today.”

The tension melted out of the body wrapped around him. “What now?” Eskel asked.

“Vesemir says we fight, didn’t seem to clear on how.”

“Fight…each other? The asshole duke?”

“The darkness,” Geralt answered, because telling Eskel he felt like he was standing on the crumbing edge of a bottomless chasm of self-loathing and frustration sounded even more melodramatic. 

“Well, fuck.”

“Yeah.”

Eskel leaned back far enough to catch Geralt’s chin and tilt his face up. He moved as if to kiss him, then froze.

“Uh, can—”

Geralt kissed him in answer, a chaste press of his lips that rapidly slid towards filthy after Eskel gasped in surprise.

Eskel broke for air sometime later. He pressed their foreheads together. “I…you…” he growled in frustration.

Maybe Geralt wasn’t the only one a little bit broken. “I you too,” he said, nipping Eskel’s nose lightly.

“It’s not enough, though, is it?” Eskel asked in whisper.

Geralt prodded at his tangled feelings. “It’s more than I ever thought I’d have,” he said eventually.

Eskel sniffed. A single tear crept down his face, catching and spilling from the grooves in his cheek. He sucked in a breath. “Okay, okay. Fight the darkness. We’re witchers, that’s the whole job, so. Fuck the darkness.”

Geralt hid his smile in Eskel’s chest.


	5. The winter war

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The wolves of Kaer Morhen fight for Geralt's life. They don't always know what to do but they don't stop trying, and that's enough to keep Geralt alive for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: dark humor, insomnia, references to past sexual assault, anxiety-induced food issues
> 
> Thanks again for your feedback! As you might expect, this was a tough fic to write. I'm glad to know what I'm getting right, and what I could do better.

The first weapon Vesemir handed Geralt was a fork. When Eskel had finally dragged him downstairs for breakfast, they found the tables laden with all Geralt’s favorite foods.

Guilt twisted Geralt’s already knotted stomach. They couldn’t afford to eat like this, especially when he could only finish a few bites of each dish. Under the watchful eyes of all three wolves, Geralt cleared his plate with the same dogged determination and enthusiasm he applied to clearing drowner nests, which is to say, more stubborn perseverance than enjoyment. He washed the whole mess down with the cup of bitter tea Vesemir handed him, then meditated until he was sure it would stay down.

His stomach was just starting to feel halfway normal when Vesemir dragged him back to the table again by his collar like a knee-high child.

Lunch tested Geralt even more than breakfast.

Swallowing every morsel was an act of will. His stomach didn’t feel any fuller, but his throat did, like every bite he’d taken was stuck above his collarbones.

Geralt didn’t keep the second meal down. By the time he finished losing everything he’d eaten that day, he’d come to hate all of his favorite foods. He hid in the ruins of the west wing until Eskel appeared wild-eyed and panting.

Maybe hiding in the ruins had been a bad call.

Eskel dragged him back to the main hall and shoved him onto a bench in front of the table. The table was empty but for a bowl of broth so weak humans would have called it water.

“I’ll be in the library,” Eskel said. He squeezed Geralt’s shoulder, fingers hard on the ridge of his shoulder blade.

Geralt was left alone with his warm broth. Well, alone-ish. He could hear Vesemir in the kitchen around the corner.

He crossed his arms on the table and slouched down to rest his chin on them, considering the bowl. It wasn’t even half full, and Geralt did manage to get liquids down sometimes. And everything was easier without an audience.

Vesemir began to sing in the kitchen. Geralt had never, ever, in his century of life, heard their mentor sing. His voice was thin and reedy, an old man’s voice singing an elvish tune in some forgotten dialect. Geralt could almost translate the words if he concentrated. He took an absentminded sip of his broth.

It was a love song about a forbidden romance between an elf queen and a human king. Jaskier sang it occasionally, and he always sighed when he got to the end. “True love, Geralt. The first, last and greatest beauty in this whole benighted world.”

Geralt sipped air. He blinked down at his bowl to find it empty. He’d finished a meal. Thinking about it made his stomach do a queasy little flip.

Vesemir walked out into the hall, still drying his hands on a dish rag.

“New strategy, Wolf,” he said. “A half a bowl of broth every two hours.”

“Sounds like a lot.”

“Not enough to keep you alive, but we have to start somewhere.” Vesemir pulled an hourglass from his pocket and handed it to Geralt.

“Really?”

“Until I can trust you to eat otherwise.”

Eating did get easier after that, mostly. After a few days, Vesemir began to phase in solid, bland foods. Geralt didn’t always succeed at mealtimes, sometimes he failed to force anything past his lips, sometimes it refused to stay down. But as the weeks rolled by and the days began to grow longer again, he noticed the dips between his ribs beginning to fill.

Eskel sighed happily as he ran his fingers over Geralt’s sides, and that almost made it worth the constant struggle. Almost. 

* * *

While Vesemir waged his campaign in the kitchen, Eskel waged his in the bedroom.

And not in a sexy way, damn it.

Eskel’s primary concern seemed to be conquering Geralt’s insomnia.

“I don’t have sleep patterns,” Geralt told him, when Eskel prodded him for an exacting description of when and how he preferred to go to sleep and wake up.

“Everyone has sleep patterns,” Eskel said.

“People who actually fucking sleep have sleep patterns,” Geralt said, and then got up to find something to clean or cut up in the kitchen. He ignored Eskel’s heartbeat in the hallway for a while; he wasn’t much trusted with solitude these days.

“Just get in here and peal fucking potatoes with me Eskel,” he said eventually.

Eskel rolled around the corner and used the wall to pull himself to his feet, knees popping. “I used to have a sleep pattern,” he said.

“No one is fucking stopping you from fucking sleeping,” Geralt said. There seemed to be a relationship between how little he slept and how much he cussed, but he hadn’t bothered to work out the exact ratio.

“Sorry,” Eskel said. “I’m not mad at you. I’m just…”

“Fucking tired. Yeah, I hear you.” Geralt jabbed his peeling knife into the potato in front of him and dropped his forehead to the table. He drifted to the edge of sleep immediately, but his mind would not let him relax into it. Swirling thoughts tugged him in a dozen different directions: snippets of remembered conversations around this table, the smell of oak beneath his nose, the feel of his naked hips scraping over and over on the edge.

Geralt jerked awake flailing.

“Ow.” Eskel said nasally. For a moment Geralt couldn’t work out how what had happened, why Eskel was on his feet behind him with his hand clapped over his nose and blood running through his fingers. The dull ache in his elbow hardly registered among his myriad aches and pains. 

“Shit. Fuck. I’m sorry.” He got up to retrieve a towel from the stack in the corner. It would not be the first time the kitchen linens were used to clean up blood.

“Nightmares,” Eskel said. He set his own nose with a dull crack.

Geralt scowled and bit back a hasty response. “Yes…no. Not often. Have to fucking sleep to have nightmares.”

“Then that was…?”

“A memory,” Geralt ground out. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes like he could grind the images out of his brain. “Had me face down on the table for a while.”

Eskel collapsed against the wall and slid down it. The bloody rag pressed to his nose covered too much of his face for Geralt to read his reaction.

“Esk?”

“Think I’m starting to get why you have so much trouble eating.” He did sound queasy.

“That’s just the blood running down your throat,” Geralt said as he stalked to Eskel’s side.

“Comforting, thanks. I should be comforting you.”

“You’re tired.” He touched Eskel’s shoulder tentatively. “Ok?”

“More,” Eskel said, glaring over his bloody hands until Geralt sank down beside him with his arm over Eskel’s shoulder. “And you’re more tired.”

“Not a competition. But yes, I am winning.”

Eskel laughed a wet laugh that sprayed tiny blood droplets across the floor.

“Gross,” Geralt observed without heat. He thought longingly of his top 10 favorite naps and restful sleeps. He had a list. “Remember that time we fell asleep on the walls and missed lunch?”

Eskel looked at him like he’d grown horns. “That one time? No, I don’t. We used to fall asleep after sparring every other day. What was so memorable about that one time?”

“It was just…good. It was spring, almost time to leave for the Path again. And Lambert came up and joined us, and he just sort of flopped down with us and wasn’t a little shit for a whole hour.”

“Ok, I do actually remember that.”

“Or after the meteor shower, what, ten years ago, when we fell asleep on the roof? Yeah, that was also good. I mean we weren’t, us, yet, but we were still good. We’ve always been good. Like noon naps and midnight star showers good.” Gods he was losing it right here on the kitchen floor. He shut his teeth with a click.

Eskel lowered the rag from his face to squint at Geralt. “Hmm.”

“Hmm,” Geralt echoed. Yes, he could see why that annoyed Jaskier. Thinking of Jaskier hurt more when he was this tired, mostly because he didn’t have the strength not to think about Jaskier when he was this tired.

“C’mon, it’s past midnight,” Eskel said, dragging Geralt to his feet. “We’re gonna try something new.”

But when they got back to Eskel’s room, he just stripped Geralt of his shirt and pushed him into bed.

“This is not new,” Geralt observed to the ceiling.

Gods, he hated this ceiling. That didn’t even make sense. What had the ceiling ever done to him, besides dispassionately observe his endless nights of suffering?

Seriously, fuck this ceiling.

“Will you…can you…is it ok if…”

Geralt flopped his head towards Eskel. “You’re supposed to be the coherent one.”

Eskel huffed. “Right. Just. Punch me if anything bothers you. Can you roll onto your stomach for me?”

That sounded like a lot of effort, but it didn’t sound particularly distressing. At some point he was going to have to explain to Eskel what did and didn’t throw him backwards through time. Once he figured it out for himself.

Geralt rolled onto his stomach and buried his face in Eskel’s pillow.

The bed creaked as Eskel joined him. “Can I straddle your hips?”

This was as close to sex stuff as they’d come this winter, beyond heated kissing. Geralt grunted his affirmative, then breathed out slowly as Eskel’s weight settled on his behind. It was comforting more than anything. He had missed having Eskel close for so long, he’d never turn down the opportunity again.

A light scent drifted through the room: the oil they used when they had sex. Geralt’s muscles jumped at Eskel’s slick hand between his shoulder blades.

“Ok?” Eskel asked as he began to move his hands across Geralt’s back.

Geralt deliberately breathed out, willing his body to relax into the touch. It didn’t right away. But he reminded himself he was safe, Eskel was behind him but Eskel was safe. His hands were staying well above Geralt’s waist too.

“Wolf?” Eskel’s faltered to a stop on Geralt’s skin

“More,” Geralt ground out. Eskel obliged, beginning an achingly slow and through massage that pressed into all Geralt’s knotted muscles and smoothed them straight. That done, he switched to long, smooth strokes that slid slowly and predictably up and down his back, across his shoulders and down his arms, over and over in an endless round the soothed Geralt towards sleep.

Geralt wasn’t aware of tipping over the edge but when he woke a few hours before dawn, he felt more rested than he had in months. He slipped out from under Eskel’s arm and knelt by the embers of the fire to meditate until breakfast.

“He’s crepuscular!” Eskel exclaimed triumphantly over breakfast a few days later. 

“He would be,” Lambert said without looking up from his eggs.

Vesemir shot him an entirely ineffective glare. “What does that mean?”

Geralt’s fists clenched. This was the first he’d heard of this new malady, but it didn’t sound good.

“Like bats and cats,” Eskel explained without explaining anything.

Lambert put down his fork. “I can see it… the leathery skin, creepy eyes…” Which was ridiculous because they all had the same eyes.

“His sleep patterns, asshole. He sleeps best in the middle of the day and the middle of the night. He’s most awake at dawn and dusk. Like…like a ferret.”

“A ferret,” Geralt repeated.

“Also some snakes.” Eskel pushed a book across the table to him. Geralt stared at it without seeing it and thought back on Eskel’s recent campaign. He’d stopped pestering Geralt into bed just after dinner, though Geralt thought at the time he’d just given it up as a bad job, letting him fall into bed whenever the whim took him. In addition to nightly and sometimes mid-day massages, he’d encouraged the post training naps, so much so Geralt was probably getting half of his sleep in the middle of the day like some lazy lordling.

Or a ferret. And some snakes.

“Side effect of the extra mutagens, maybe,” Vesemir said, reading over Geralt’s shoulder.

Eskel grinned. Lambert grinned. Both expressions promised endless rounds of friendly and not-so-friendly teasing.

Rested and well-fed, neither bothered Geralt as much as they probably should.

* * *

If Vesemir was the master of the fork and Eskel the keeper of his sleep, Lambert was the ringmaster of their whole little circus. His usual manic energy had notched up two pegs to frenzied as he threw himself and Geralt into projects around the keep. Gwent tournaments between the four of them now included self-designed and committee-approved cards.

Lambert was the only one on the committee.

He’d invented a dozen new flavors of vodka and poisoned them twice. One notable explosives experiment leveled an unused wing of the keep and left Geralt with green hair for a week. It was exhausting, which was actually a point in Lambert’s favor, but it was also going to get them both killed.

Geralt finally tackled him to the middle of his workshop floor and sat on his chest.

“Lamb, I appreciate this—”

“My cat. This is how he helped me.”

Geralt blinked at him several times. Cats hated witchers.

“Aiden, you thick-skulled albino ferret.”

Ah. The cat witcher. Right. “Does he sleep in the middle of the day?” Geralt asked with a head tilt.

Lambert growled at him. “I’m baring my heart down here fuckstick, try for a tiny bit of respect.”

Geralt raised his eyebrows.

“He does nap in the middle of the day,” Lambert admitted with a blush on his cheeks.

“Hmm. Your cat witcher…?” See, Geralt was a mature adult. He could have phrased that in so many other ways.

“He…so, I’ve always had…you know, the other boys in my year, they…fuck.”

“Hmm.”

“Shut up.”

“Actually, think I might be following.” Geralt knew Lambert had been the only survivor of his class. He shifted a little on his knees so Lambert could breathe more freely.

Lambert scowled at him. “Anyway, I’ve always had all this bottomless, boundless—"

“Seething rage?”

“Yeah, yes.” Lambert thwacked Geralt’s thigh in agreement. “That. Anyway, Aiden helped me direct all that shit away from myself, kept me busy, kept me sane.”

Geralt nodded. “I understand. It does help. I just don’t have your endless energy.”

“Yeah, you are old, I guess. Now help me set up this new still.”

“Lambert.”

“Then you can go nap in the sun.”


	6. Summertime sadness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ups and downs at Kaer Morhen as Geralt and the wolves learn to cope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: disassociation, some lingering suicidal thoughts, Geralt's piss-poor self esteem...awkward apologies.
> 
> Despite the cw's, this is actually pretty fluffy. I guess it's all relative. 
> 
> As always, thanks for your support! Thanks in particular to those folks who comment. They keep the motivation high!

It was midsummer before Geralt noticed summer had started. He generally marked the end of spring by the unavoidable loss of the other wolves’ company, and the rest of the seasons by his route along the Path, but not this year.

Lambert disappeared as soon as the passes cleared, but he returned a few weeks later covered in black ichor with a fat purse to show for his effort.

“Looking like it will be a long, uncertain spring,” Vesemir said. “Going to get more supplies.”

Eskel went through the armory looking for anything they could sell and sent his haul with Vesemir. Their mentor returned with an enormously over laden cart. Between that, another cart of supplies Lambert returned with a few weeks later, their hunting and the garden that had sprung up in a distant courtyard, they had more than enough food, enough even to see them through another winter.

They were well into fall before Geralt realized that had been the intention all along.

When Geralt looked back on that time later, he would find his memory riddled with holes. There were days, sometimes weeks, when lack of sleep or poor nutrition ate up his willpower and concentration. Some days he had no excuse at all for not being present in his own body, except that it was a generally miserable experience and it was nice to drift.

Other memories were bright-edged and trapped in amber.

* * *

Geralt was laying awake in Eskel’s bed again. Eskel had fallen asleep in his usual place at Geralt’s back, his broader shoulders and bigger bulk wrapped like armor around Geralt’s slighter frame.

Eskel whimpered and pressed closer to Geralt in his sleep, clutching his chest hard enough to inhibit Geralt’s breathing. The scent of sadness flooded the room.

It was the third time this week.

They’d known each other for a century, had fucked off and on for most of that time, and had slept in each other’s arms for a season; Geralt had learned the course of Eskel’s recurring nightmares. It helped that Geralt shared most of them.

When Eskel lay whimpering, flat on his back with his arms at his sides, he was dreaming of the trials, reliving that pain in twisted new configurations. The fetal curl, with his face buried his knees and his hands clutching at his cheek, that was his child surprise shredding his face.

This clutching at Geralt and mourning in his sleep was a new pattern for Eskel.

Geralt nibbled at Eskel’s fingers where they were clenched just under his chin, worrying at callouses and scars with sharp teeth until Eskel woke.

“Sorry, Wolf. Sorry.” His voice was thick.

“Stop apologizing to me.”

“You need your sleep.”

“So do you. Nightmares?”

“I keep dreaming that I wake up, here, just like this. But you don’t.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re dead in my arms, decaying, and I can’t let you go.”

Geralt wriggled around until he was facing Eskel. He poked Eskel’s shoulder until he rolled onto his back, then poked the other shoulder until he rolled away from Geralt. Threading an arm under Eskel’s waist and throwing the other over his side, Geralt tucked himself against Eskel’s back with a sigh like a man coming home.

“Good?” he asked.

Eskel stayed rigid in his embrace. “You like the other way.”

“I do. I like this too. Makes me feel a little less like a selfish, useless piece of shit.”

“What?” Eskel craned his neck to look back at Geralt, but he hid his face in Eskel’s hair.

“Nice to feel like I can protect you too.”

Letting out his breath in a huff, Eskel finally melted into him. “You do protect me.” He sounded like he was already half-asleep, the lucky bastard.

“Doing a shit job of it,” Geralt said.

With an uncertain hum, Eskel drifted into a quieter sleep. Geralt laid awake, counting his heartbeats, slow and steady beneath Geralt’s hands.

Eskel had a new kind of nightmare, and Geralt had given it to him.

* * *

The first time Geralt ran the walls without wishing he’d succeeded at offing himself, he had to acknowledge that Vesemir might be on to something with the scheduled meals. Or Eskel was with the whole cat nap thing. Probably both.

Naturally, that’s when everything went to shit again.

Spring had snuck up on them. Eskel returned from feeding the horses one morning with glittering eyes and flushed cheeks to report that the courtyard was dry enough for sparring. During the worst weather they sparred in an unused corner of the great hall to burn off some of their energy, but they could only really stretch their legs and practice their signs in the open air, and the long, emotionally fraught winter had them all climbing the walls. Literally, in Lambert’s case.

Vesemir paired off with Eskel to work on his signs, as if they needed any work, and Lambert threw himself sword first at Geralt with glee.

The smooth flow of his body from one form to the next, the heat in his muscles, the sharp edge of Lambert’s grin: Geralt felt good. They danced back and forth in the tacky soil of the courtyard for an hour with neither gaining the upper hand before Lambert made his move.

Sunlight hit Geralt straight in the eyes. Lambert had worked Geralt around to face east without him noticing, and Lambert’s next swing slid under his guard and broke Geralt’s Quen.

Lambert grinned and dropped, spinning in a lightning fast kick that knocked Geralt’s feet out from under him.

He fell to his knees hard. With a triumphant shout, Lambert fisted his hand in Geralt’s collar and yanked him close to lay the flat of his blade against his throat.

Geralt looked up at Lambert’s belt buckle.

He lost time. 

“Easy now, Wolf. That’s it. You know where you are?”

There was blood on the edge of his blade, a copper tang in the back of his throat.

“Ow! That fucking hurts, you sadistic old bastard.”

“Pressure, Lambert. You know I have to put pressure on it.”

“Geralt. I need you to talk to me, Wolf.”

Geralt blinked at Eskel. He stood between Geralt and Lambert, who was on the ground with Vesemir above him, leaning hard on a bleeding gash on Lambert’s thigh.

Eskel was protecting them from Geralt.

Dropping his sword, Geralt stumbled back a few steps. He didn’t even remember getting to his feet.

“You’re alright, Wolf. You’re good.” Eskel followed Geralt but stayed just beyond his reach.

Geralt fell to his hands and knees and threw up his breakfast, waves of nausea wringing his stomach until nothing but bile came up.

He was a monster, a danger to the few people in this rotten world who tried to help him. He had lashed out at a brother with no control during a sparring session, lost himself entirely in the middle of the fight. He would get them killed if he didn’t accidentally kill one of them himself. They were better off without him.

Time went fuzzy again.

He recognized the thumping under his cheek eventually. Eskel’s heartbeat, he’d know it anywhere.

Jaskier would have had something appropriately poetic to say about the way Eskel dragged Geralt back to life with little more than willpower and the beat of his own heart, an act of true love that set their hearts beating in sync forevermore. Truth was, Geralt’s heart beat slower than Eskel’s, had since the trials. 

“How is Lambert?” Eskel asked.

“He’ll be fine, more glad to get out of stable chores than anything,” Vesemir replied from the door to Eskel’s room.

Geralt’s head rose and fell with Eskel’s sigh of relief. Eskel was flat on his back on the bed, Geralt draped over his chest.

“How mad is he?”

Leather creaked. A shrug. “Think he’s mostly mad at himself.”

Lambert needed no new reasons to abuse himself, but Geralt had provided one. He could have spared them all this pain if he’d died up there on that tower. But he couldn’t even manage to end his own life properly.

Eskel tugged on Geralt’s medallion gently, cutting into his thoughts. “You with me, Wolf?”

“Don’t want to be,” Geralt said thickly.

“Too fucking bad.”

Geralt ground his teeth and swallowed his response.

He didn’t speak at all for three days, didn’t respond to questions, didn’t even think in words for most of that time. Eskel poked and prodded him around his room, forcing him to follow an abbreviated version of their routine, nagging him until he ate, but Geralt wasn’t an active participant in any of it. His body was there but he was not.

At some point, he ended up barefoot in the stables. Lambert shoved a rake into his hand.

“Your demon mare has bitten me one too many times.”

Geralt frowned at him. Had Lambert dragged him out here?

Lambert limped over to his horse’s stall. Geralt still hadn’t apologized for maiming him, had instead checked out of life entirely and forced Lambert to pick up the slack around the keep. Gods he was a piece of shit. Geralt opened his mouth to apologize, but Lambert cut him off.

“I’m sorry,” Lambert said. It sounded like he had to pry the words loose with something sharp.

Geralt attacked the half-frozen muck in Roach’s stall with something approaching his usual vigor. “I stabbed you, I think.”

“You think? Never mind. Yes, you stabbed me. But I crossed a line.”

“You didn’t know where the line was. I don’t know where the fucking lines are.”

“We’ll find them.”

“Yay.”

Lambert let silence rest for half a minute before he broke it again. “I’m sorry for something else.”

“If you’ve dyed my underclothes pink again, I will burn yours.”

“Bastard. No. I uh. I was an asshole when you first got here.”

“You’re always an asshole.”

“You’re really making this hard, you know that?”

Geralt let his swinging hair cover his half-smile. He’d missed Lambert this winter, though they’d been living in each other’s pockets. Well. Lambert had been living. Geralt had been doing something altogether less productive.

“ANYWAY. I’m sorry, I didn’t—It’s just that you’re so, you’re so…you.”

“Unavoidably.”

“Shut up. And I knew what it looked like, but.”

Raising his eyebrows, Geralt turned to look at Lambert.

“I just didn’t think it could happen, Geralt. Not to you, you’re the best of us. So I ignored the obvious.”

Geralt crossed his arms and leaned his back against the divider between Roach’s stall and the one Lambert was cleaning. “I was outnumbered and outplayed.”

“I’m not—”

“Two dozen armed guards, with Jaskier right in the middle of them.”

“That’s—”

“Knew I could take it, knew Jaskier couldn’t.” He had no choice, not even in his own body’s reaction to the situation, and he knew it. Why was he still digging a deeper rut in this well-trod, circular path?

“Hey!” Lambert thwacked the back of his head.

Geralt snapped his teeth at Lambert’s hand.

“Feral much? Seriously, just shut up for a minute.” Lambert leaned over the stall divider beside Geralt, glaring at the ground as if had personally offended him.

“Aiden,” he said.

“Your cat.”

“Yes, he is. My cat.”

Geralt blinked “Yours?”

“Mine.”

That required a titanic shift of his mental model of Lambert. “I’m glad,” he managed. “Does he know that?”

Lambert blushed. “I’m still working on that part.”

Geralt, who hadn’t known he was in love with his two best friends for over a century between them, could hardly criticize. “Right.”

“But. If it were a choice between Aiden and me, if there was a chance, no matter how small, that I could spare him something like that…I get it.”

“You do.”

“The Path is paved in shit from one gutter to the other, you do what you have to, to survive. You don’t have to justify yourself to me. That’s what I’m trying to say. I believe you, I’m sorry I was such an ass about it before.”

“…Right. Sorry for almost killing you.”

“You’d have to do better than that to kill me.” Lambert grinned at him.

“Whatever.” Geralt shook himself and returned to cleaning Roach’s stall. He eyed his mare’s suspiciously rounded belly. “Now who should be apologizing for letting the stallions get at Roach?”

* * *

Geralt was laying in the bottom of a sun-bleached boat with the white light of noon warming his bare chest and arms. He could feel the chill of the lake seeping up through the wood, a pleasing contrast to the sun warming his front. Even through his eyelids the brightness of the light almost hurt, but Geralt was comfortable floating there, suspended between hot and cold.

Lambert dropped a floppy hat over his face and the relief was immediate.

Geralt grunted his thanks. 

“This is fishing?” Geralt asked eventually, pushing the hat off his face. He blinked at the sky; the sun had jumped a few hours closer to the horizon without him noticing.

“Nah,” Lambert said. Shockingly, it was the first he’d spoken since he’d dragged Geralt from his meditation in the pre-dawn hours, herded him down the path to the lake beneath Kaer Morhen, and shoved him into the rickety boat.

Lambert’s leathers creaked as he sat up and rustled around in one of the bags at his side. He tossed something overboard that splashed into the lake a few paces away.

“What—”

An explosion shattered the quiet peace of the afternoon. A chest-high shockwave of water picked up their little boat and tossed it aside, spilling Geralt and Lambert into the frigid lake.

Geralt came up sputtering as destruction rained down around them. Clumps of pondweed landed with wet plops among shocked fish gasping on the surface. A fine mist of water vapor drifted in the air, clinging to Geralt’s eyelashes.

“That was fishing,” Lambert said from a where he floated on his back a few feet away.

“You are insane.”

“Takes one to know one.” He grinned and began sweeping stunned fish towards their waterlogged boat.

It took them half an hour to gather their ‘catch’, bail the water out of the boat, and resituate themselves comfortably. They sat across from each other in the bottom of the boat, their backs braced on opposite sides, grinning like the little boys they’d never had a chance to be.

Lambert handed him some dried strips of something to gnaw on and Geralt took them, chewing more for something to do than out of any real hunger.

“You can go back to sleep if you want,” Lambert said. “We’re done fishing.”

“Haven’t got any more bombs on you?”

Lambert grinned and tipped his bag towards Geralt, revealing a truly alarming number of bombs. Alarming even to Geralt, who didn’t think he had any energy left for alarm.

Geralt matched his grin. “Let’s keep fishing.”

* * *

The first time Geralt woke next to Eskel hard he genuinely didn’t know what to do with himself. His last attempt at sexual intimacy had ended with Eskel bodily throwing Geralt away. He knew now that it had been a misunderstanding. But knowing in his head that Eskel had been afraid to hurt him was very different from believing it down to his bones.

After a few moments of letting Eskel’s heartbeat calm his mind, Geralt wrote it off as a random, involuntary reaction to the slab of muscle that was Eskel, then got up and meditated until breakfast.

It kept happening though, with alarming frequency.

The frequency wasn’t unusual; they’d enjoyed an active sex life Before. The alarming part was the widening gulf between his body’s reaction and his mind’s.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to have sex at all.

Eskel didn’t seem in any rush to find out. He sighed with contentment at Geralt’s hands on his shoulder blades, kissed the top of Geralt’s head when he sprawled on Eskel’s chest, and kept his own hands chastely above Geralt’s waist like a blushing virgin.

Confusingly, that only made Eskel more attractive to Geralt.

Then Geralt caught himself getting hard just from watching Eskel spar shirtless and came to the unfortunate conclusion that it was possible to be horny and neurotic at the same time.

He tackled Eskel to bed with the late summer sun still streaming in Eskel’s bedroom window. The golden light of a high-alpine evening cast long shadows on Eskel’s torso, highlighting the ridges of muscle and washing out the scars. Geralt mapped the differences with his fingertips.

“Wolf?” He asked, catching both of Geralt’s hands. “I don’t think I can do this.”

Geralt swallowed hard and rolled off Eskel’s body. Phantom knife blades twisted in his gut.

“No, hey. Wait,” Eskel said, scrambling after him.

“Damn it, Eskel,” Geralt spit out through clenched teeth. “If you aren’t attracted to me because I’m used trash, just say it and be done.”

“No, Geralt. That’s not it, you must know that,” he said. He kissed the nape of Geralt’s neck.

“How would I know that?”

“Here, feel?” He took one of Geralt’s clenched fists and forced it open, then guided it to his cloth-covered erection.

Geralt had several reactions at once. He tore his wrist out of Eskel’s grip and snapped his arm to his chest, shrinking into himself. He also got harder in his trousers.

“That,” Eskel said, “Is the problem.”

Geralt hissed at him then bit his lip in mortification.

Gods, he was a walking disaster. If the trials and experimental mutations had rerigged his brain with all the lines crossed, the last few years had gone through like a whirlwind, scrambling what was left.

“I want you,” Eskel said, “But I don’t know how to have you without hurting you.”

“You didn’t hurt me.”

Eskel reached for his face slowly, telegraphing his intentions. He touched Geralt’s lip and came away with blood on his fingers. Geralt had bitten his lip bloody. Again.

“It’s never going to heal,” Geralt told him. They both knew he wasn’t talking about his lip.

Eskel traced his fingers down his own scarred cheek, leaving faint smears of Geralt’s blood behind. The down-turned twist of his mouth was bitter. “Some injuries don’t heal, not all the way. They become part of you, and you learn how to live with them.”


	7. Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turning the corner doesn't happen all at once. Sometimes, you just look back and find it behind you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: panic attacks, Geralt's trash self esteem, mentions of past trauma, not-super-graphic smut. Fluffy fluff.
> 
> Thanks again for your kudos and comments. NEVER hesitate to comment. I totes flex my guns in my victory pose every time I get a comment.

Roach gave birth to a chestnut filly during the last warm week of the fall. She was a delicate little thing, her coat a deep cherry red but for the white star on her forehead. The day after she was born Geralt and Eskel watched her discover how her legs worked, leaping and skittering and falling around in the crunchy, late-season grass of the lower pasture as Roach looked on protectively.

Geralt sat on the fence with Eskel draped over the top rail beside him, chin on his crossed arms.

“She has my hair,” Geralt commented as the filly shook her red mane hard enough to knock herself over.

Eskel was chewing on a wheat stalk like a field hand, drawing Geralt’s attention to his lips. He could kiss them now, he knew Eskel would allow it, welcome it even. But he couldn’t do more.

“The red was nice,” Eskel eventually responded. “But I’ve always liked the white better.”

“You like my corpse hair.”

“Hair does not change color when you die.”

“Hmm.”

Eskel looked up at him with a lazy smile. “Anyway. It’s straight. Easier to run my fingers through.”

Geralt laughed, loud and concussive, then snapped his teeth closed on the unnatural sound. Attracted by the noise, Roach wandered over to lip at his pockets while the filly gambled around the pasture aimlessly. She ran out of energy and came to a stop sprawled out at their feet.

Geralt named her Also Roach and got a bruise on his bicep from Lambert for it.

* * *

The library was dim, lit only by the glow of the fire in the hearth, but darkness didn’t bother the witchers. Vesemir sat closest to the warmth and light, reading an ancient bestiary Lambert had dug out of the attic. Geralt was playing Gwent with Lambert, Eskel at his side making smart-ass commentary about both of their poor choices without discrimination. Vesemir snorted occasionally, hiding his laughter in the sound.

Eskel hooked his chin on Geralt’s shoulder and they all froze.

It wasn’t that they didn’t touch each other, they were past that. They even touched each other in front of Vesemir and Lambert...except they didn’t, not really. They sparred and wrestled, and Eskel held him together when Geralt was falling apart. They didn’t do affectionate touches in public unless something terrible was happening.

“What’s wrong?” Geralt asked.

“Nothing,” Eskel said.

Geralt tilted his head to the side. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Lambert asked.

“Sweet Melitele, the two of you. Nothing is wrong.” Eskel made a visible effort to relax, draping himself a little more comfortably over Geralt’s side.

Geralt squinted at him from the corner of his eye.

“Nothing!” Eskel repeated. “Just. Today was a good day.”

“Today was exactly like yesterday.”

“Exactly. A perfectly average, perfect day.”

Eskel nosed at Geralt’s neck. Geralt let out the breath he was holding, tipped his head to the side and rested his cheek on the top of Eskel’s head.

“Get a room,” Lambert said, ever the child of the family.

“Can we use yours?” Eskel asked.

Geralt’s shoulders shook with a silent laugh.

* * *

Midwinter brought another storm every bit as tumultuous as last year’s blizzard.

The other wolves followed Geralt for days before the holiday. He tried to bear it with patience, he’d react the same way if one of them lost their shit as spectacularly has he had, but having two or three sets of eyes on him at all times made him feel hunted.

After a subdued dinner, everyone retired to their rooms, even Geralt. He had spent most nights of the past year in Eskel’s room, but tonight he was being a shit. If they wanted to watch him all night, let them take up posts in the frigid air of his tower stairwell.

Five minutes of listening to Eskel’s steady, mediative breathing outside Geralt’s door was all it took for his resolve to crumble.

Eskel didn’t even gloat when Geralt dragged him into the room.

“If you want to be alone, well. I can’t let you,” Eskel told him with a hangdog look. “Not tonight, I’m sorry. But I don’t have to invade your space.”

“I’m fucking fine Eskel.”

“I’m not, Geralt.”

Geralt winced, then rolled his eyes in a gesture that recruited his whole head. “Fine. If you’re going to play babysitter, I’d rather you were actually in the room, you mule-headed bulldog.”

“You give me the sweetest pet names.”

Stripping off his shirt and breeches, Geralt climbed into bed. Eskel settled into the chair next to the fire.

“I know I’m not going to be able to sleep,” he said, in answer to Geralt’s confused growl.

“Suit yourself. There are books on the mantel.”

Geralt lay down and quickly realized he wasn’t going to sleep either. Last time he’d slept here he’d awoken with his entire reality picked up and set down two paces to the left.

He turned his head. Eskel hadn’t picked a book to read and he wasn’t meditating. He was slumped in his seat with his hands hanging limp between his knees, just staring into the fire.

From this angle, Geralt could only see the scarred side of his face.

They’d looked so alike as boys the instructors often mistook them for one another. The loss of all the color in Geralt’s skin and hair had put an end to that long before Eskel’s child surprise had so irrevocably wounded him.

“Might as well do something fun if we’re going to be awake,” Geralt said, because he was the sort of fucked up person who found scars arousing.

“Like reading?” Eskel asked, innocent as the summer sky.

“Not what I had in mind, you little shit.”

Eskel gave him a half smile.

“Now, you make a joke about size,” Geralt ordered. “Something about no one ever complaining before.”

“So that’s what’s on your mind, then.”

Geralt threw back the covers, got up and began to pace.

“Sometimes. Fairly often. Right now,” he said, punctuating each statement with an abrupt turn to stalk back across the room.

“Do you really want it, or are you just pushing yourself again?”

“Don’t know, Esk.” He gave the roots of his own hair a yank. “Want to feel normal. And I miss you, your—” Geralt gestured at Eskel.

“All of this?” Eskel asked, sprawling back and gesturing to his own body with an exaggerated leer.

Geralt snorted. “Yes, that too, you ass. I miss…” Geralt delivered it to the ceiling “…being that close to you.”

Eskel rose and stopped Geralt’s pacing by standing in front of him. He wrapped his fingers around Geralt’s medallion. “I miss that too.” He rubbed his other hand across his scars. “Ok. You don’t have to tell me what happened, but you have to tell me what not to do.”

“That’s the same thing,” Geralt growled. He wasn’t desperate enough to open that nest of nekkers.

One of Eskel’s eyebrows rose.

With a sigh, Geralt wrapped his arms around Eskel and hooked his chin over his shoulder so he could address this shit to the blank wall behind him. “I don’t think I can get on my knees for you.”

“Yeah, I figured that one out myself.”

“Maybe not—” a bead of sweat rolled down Geralt’s back, “—not face down.”

Eskel’s fingers flexed, then began to trace little patterns on Geralt’s neck, too deliberate to be anything but letters. Or protective runes? “Anything else?”

“The scars on my ass,” Gerlt’s voice was too loud, “Don’t touch them.”

“Ok.” Eskel leaned back. He took one of Geralt’s hands and lifted it to his scarred cheek. Geralt dragged his fingers down the ridges of tissue as he had a hundred times before, letting his calluses scrape the deadened skin and making Eskel shudder.

“I drew steel on the first whore who tried to touch these,” Eskel said.

Geralt made a disbelieving sound.

“I did. Couldn’t bear the kindness of it, not for years. Then you were there, snarling at me, clawing at the ugliest parts of me like you wanted them for yourself.”

“I…you…” Geralt rolled his eyes. It was like the mages had picked through his brain until they found that one, tiny little word and then burned it out of him. He kissed Eskel’s scarred lip.

Eskel smiled, ducking his head to hide his blush. “I you too. Anything else to avoid?”

Fuck, this was difficult. “Just you, ok? Nothing else.”

“I don’t understand.”

Geralt bit down on Eskel’s cloth-covered shoulder in frustration, hard enough to mark a normal man.

The silence stretched while Eskel waited for Geralt to find the words to answer. Sucking in a deep breath, he spat it out. “Don’t put anything in me that isn’t attached to you.”

Eskel went still against him. Geralt could hear his heartbeat pickup, could feel it against his chest. He wasn’t breathing.

Geralt stomped on the impulse to run and waited for Eskel to react. “‘Cept oil, I guess,” he added as an afterthought.

Eskel’s snort was strangled, but he started breathing again. “Alright. What if…what if you took me?”

They didn’t often reverse roles like that. Only once, in fact. Geralt drew back to give Eskel an unimpressed look. “Think that’s already on the list of things not to do.”

Eskel blushed again. Geralt loved that he still could. He tugged him by his hands towards the bed, gently as he knew how.

They made love. That was the only way to describe it. It helped if Geralt imagined Jaskier saying it, cooing about bonds forged in fire and expressed in flesh.

Geralt relaxed back onto Eskel’s chest, prepping himself while Eskel held him. Eskel peppered kisses and nibbles across Geralt’s shoulders, whispering nonsense and inventing pet names. Even now that Geralt had gotten back to a healthy weight, Eskel’s hands spanned his waist, steady against the quivering muscles of his abdomen.

When he couldn’t bear to have any space left between them at all, Geralt turned, wrapped his arms around Eskel’s neck and straddled his hips. He sank down slowly, eyes drifting shut as he concentrated on the sensation of their bodies coming together.

“Hey. Geralt, please.” The tension in Eskel’s voice made Geralt’s eyes snap open again. “I need to know you’re here, with me.”

“I’m here,” he said, and he was. He’d started to figure out where the walls of that pain-filled room were in his mind. He was nowhere near them now.

Eskel kissed him. Geralt opened his mouth into the kiss, nibbling on Eskel’s bottom lip before plunging his tongue inside. Eskel tasted of ale and cinnamon, and just the tiniest tang of lighting, like Geralt could taste the magic brimming in his body.

They moved together, like sparring, like dancing. It didn’t take long before Eskel’s rhythm began to stutter. His hand moving on Geralt brought him over the edge a few strokes later.

Eskel collapsed onto his back and pulled Geralt, still panting and twitching with the aftershocks, down to lay on his chest.

The scent of sweat and spend filled the room. Fluids slid viscously on Geralt’s skin when he moved his legs. A wave of goosebumps swept across Geralt's body, starting with the crawling skin of his scalp then rippling down his neck and back. 

He wasn’t there. He was here. And it had been good, so good.

Geralt’s rapid breathing got faster. Struggling to stop his shaking, Geralt hid his face in the junction between Eskel’s neck and shoulder.

“Lemme up,” Eskel said. He slid out from under Geralt.

The loss of contact broke the last of Geralt’s control. His ears began to burn and his vision tunneled.

He couldn’t let Eskel see. Eskel would be hurt, he’d never let Geralt back in his bed again, and it had been so good.

It had been too fucking good.

Geralt rolled to face the wall. The bed dipped behind him. “Can I clean you up?” Eskel asked.

The twitch of his shoulders was the only ‘yes’ Geralt could manage, but Eskel understood. He put one hand on Geralt’s back and swept lower with the damp cloth in the other.

Geralt hissed and tucked his knees closer to his chest.

“Sorry,” Eskel said, his touch gentling even more.

Eskel was so good, so much better than Geralt deserved. He’d wasted an entire year of his life trying to help Geralt put himself together. He put Geralt’s needs before his own in bed and everywhere else. And this was how Geralt repaid him.

Fuck, the cloth was even warm.

The fringe of Eskel’s dark hair appeared in Geralt’s peripheral vision. “Geralt?”

“Don’t freak out,” Geralt forced out.

“Why would I…shit. This is what crying looks like for you, isn’t it?”

Geralt shuddered. “Can’t cry,” he panted. “They took that from me.”

Acknowledging how fundamentally fucked up he was made him not-cry harder.

Eskel’s hands hovered uncertainly over Geralt’s torso. “Ok, ok. I’m…not freaking out. Can I hold you? Would that help?”

“Don’t look at me.”

“I don’t have to look at you. That wasn’t a no, so I’m just going to…” Eskel snuck an arm between Geralt’s waist and the bed and pulled him back against his chest. “Ok? Talk to me, please.”

Geralt bit out one word. “Yes.”

Eskel kissed the back of his neck. “I’ve seen you cry, that time Lambert got vodka in your eyes.”

“Not the same…kind of tears…” Geralt stuttered.

“Guess not. Can you…stop?”

“Right…hadn’t thought…of that…I’ll just…stop.” Geralt bit Eskel’s knuckles as his chest heaved.

“Ok, yeah. Stupid thing to say. Maybe breathe with me, match my breaths?”

Geralt tried that for a while. He focused on what he could hear: the storm raging all outside, wind swirling around the tower and shards of ice shattering against the stones, Eskel’s breath and his heartbeat, the warmth of this little cocoon they’d made for themselves.

“I’m such a fucking failure,” he said when he'd pried his teeth off Eskel's hand. “Can’t even manage mutually pleasurable sex.”

“That was extremely pleasurable sex.”

That surprised Geralt into glaring at Eskel over his shoulder. “What?”

“Was it…did I hurt you?”

“No! Gods no, it was good.” Geralt uncurled himself a little.

“Ok, good. Good. Then I’m glad we did it. Are you?”

“Yes! Yes.”

“Right, ok. Good! Don’t get me wrong, I could live without this part.” Eskel draped himself more fully over Geralt’s back, wrapping one of his hands around Geralt’s medallion. “Maybe it’s like stretching a sore muscle. It hurts like a bitch, but every time hurts a little less.”

“Hmm.”

This was the position they’d been in, when Geralt woke up after trying to kill himself, a year ago to the day.

So much had changed. Vesemir had brought his body back from the edge of starvation. Lambert had kept his mind sharp, got him involved with the life around the keep. And Eskel had blessed him with peace. Often just a peaceful night of sleep, but also the peace of mind that came from complete acceptance, when Geralt could allow himself to have it.

Geralt couldn’t deny how much had changed.

But a lot had stayed the same.

“I’m never going to win this battle,” Geralt said to the wall. “Every single fucking day of my life, for however long I’m saddled with this miserable existence, is going to be a struggle.”

“Yeah, probably,” Eskel said. His fist clenched around Geralt’s medallion, hard enough the sharp points had to be digging holes into his palm. “But that’s a pretty much how our lives have gone so far. And we’ve managed it this long.”

* * *

“Nice,” Eskel said, surveying the glacial valley sprawled out at their feet.

‘Nice’ was an understatement worthy of Geralt himself. They stood on the crest of a ridge between two high, ice-capped peaks, looking down a scree of granite and sandstone rubble. White and purple crocuses sprouted through the remnants of last winter’s snow, the ground getting ever greener as it descended towards the spruce and pine of the forest below. Sunlight glistened off water, a tumbling creek that descended in a series of shallow, crystal clear pools to a lake in the distance.

Eskel took off in a light jog and Geralt followed.

They’d taken this detour during a hunting expedition, ostensibly to check nearby valleys for monster activity, but they’d abandoned the pretense along with their horses. Now they were just running for the sake of feeling their bodies move. Sprinting down a faint game trail in Eskel’s footsteps, with the water burbling beside them and the scent of new life in his nose, Geralt couldn’t find the energy to be guilty.

Geralt slammed into Eskel’s back when the other witcher came to a sudden stop.

“What the hell, Esk.” Geralt felt like he’d run face first into a cliff wall.

“I’m hungry,” Eskel said. He plunked himself down on a flat stone beside the stream and dug around in his belt pouch.

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Geralt joined him. “Been two hours since our last forced stop, has it?”

Eskel winced. Even after a week in the wilds, he still stuck to Vesemir’s eat-every-two-hours plan, though the necessity of it had dwindled months ago.

Geralt took the dried venison Eskel handed him and ate it before forcing the issue.

“Esk,” he said, nudging their shoulders together. “I’ll be as healed as I can be, at some point. You’re going to have to let me be.”

Eskel shrugged. His wouldn’t look at Geralt.

Geralt sighed. “Doesn’t have to be today, I guess.”

They rested without speaking. 

It was quiet this high above the tree line. Beneath the gurgle of the stream, Geralt could hear a rodent rustling in the scrubby undergrowth and the distant call of a bird of prey, but the air was otherwise warm, still and silent. He wondered if the witchers who installed themselves at Kaer Morhen had known what a blessing that alpine silence would be to the coming generations, or if they merely sought such a remote place for security. If the latter, it hadn’t worked out for them.

“Doubt this place has ever been touched by human hands,” Eskel said as he scooped up a handful of water to wash down his snack.

“It still hasn’t,” Geralt said absently. His chin lifted as he scented something new on the rising breeze.

“What?” Eskel asked, looking around for the danger.

Geralt inhaled deeply, mouth open, tasting the faint tang of rain on stone that heralded rain. “Smell that?”

“No, but...” Eskel looked over their shoulders at the pass they’d come through. Geralt followed his gaze to the sky above the peaks.

“Fuck.” Geralt said.

A massive cloud bank had rolled in while they ate, a smooth wall of grey-black blooming high into the atmosphere, skirted by cauliflower clusters of puffy white cumulus. It was the first heat thunderstorm of the season, and they were in an exposed position. Worse, their horses were on the other side of the ridge, closer to the storm, picketed in the partial cover of the stunted shrubs just above tree line.

They stood as one and exchanged a glance.

“Only way out is through,” Geralt said. Eskel grunted his agreement.

Geralt led their ascent; his eyes were sharper and his reflexes quicker. The loose gravel of the trail shifted downhill underfoot, sliding them backwards half a step for every step forward. The quality of the light changed as the clouds blotted out the sun, giving even Eskel’s skin a sickly gray-green tinge. The clouds began to grumble with thunder.

They reached the top of the ridge and skidded to a stop to plan their descent.

“Oh no,” Eskel said. Geralt’s attention jumped from the slope back to his friend.

Eskel’s dark hair was standing up around his head in a halo of static electricity. Geralt flattened his hand on his own head and found his hair doing the same thing. The wet dust smell of the storm sharpened to a burning tang in the back of Geralt’s mouth.

Lightning flashed, a blue white seam splitting the air above the closest peak. The clap of thunder was deafening enough to stagger the two witchers. 

They ran.

The slippery footing became a dangerous blessing going downhill. Geralt skidded down the side of the ridge, arms windmilling for balance, skating in an avalanche of stone with each step. Thunder growled above them constantly, interspersed with cracks of sound and flashes of blinding white as lightning hit prominent stones and twisted trees on the slope.

They had descended halfway to the tree line before their hair began to lay flat on their heads again.

Geralt grinned at Eskel, a fizzing feeling growing under his sternum.

Eskel carded his fingers through Geralt’s tangled hair. “Let’s keep moving,”

“Race you!” Geralt said and darted away.

Eskel whooped and followed.

Rain began to fall as the sun dipped below the trailing skirt of the storm. Suddenly the air was full of falling shards of golden glass, fat droplets of light that shattered on their armor and in their hair as they slid down the slope laughing. 

Half-soaked and still giggling, they skidded into the little hollow where they’d left the horses.

“We lived,” Geralt said. He ran his wet fingertips over Eskel’s scars, the bubbling in his chest expanding until it felt as if his ribs would split open and spill his battered heart into Eskel’s hands.

“We lived,” Eskel repeated like a prayer. He was holding Geralt’s medallion, tethering them together.

“I could have missed this,” Geralt said, the realization hitting him like a lightning strike. He almost hadn’t lived to see Eskel with his wet hair plastered to his head, eyes gold and glowing like the rain falling around them.

Eskel’s face spasmed. “I would have missed it too.”

Geralt’s stomach clenched.

“Is that enough?” Eskel asked.

Was it? Could he live for the gold-gilded moments of the future, however infrequent and uncertain they were?

“Maybe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Do NOT run towards a thunderstorm on a mountaintop. Totally the worst idea. Run AWAY from the storm. Or crouch on your toes in as small a space as possible and wrap your arms around your head


	8. The new path

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A return to form and a long awaited reunion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Jaskier
> 
> I'm really glad/sad to see that this fic is resonating. Glad because that's why I wrote it, so we'd all be a little less alone with our demons, and sad because these demons are so familiar to folks. Ugh, I made myself sad. ANYWAY. Here's another chapter, thank you for your support.

Spring came late to the blue mountains, later than to the rest of the continent, but they could not deny that it had come again. The Path called. Lambert had already left for a few weeks, returned with supplies, and left again. Geralt didn’t think he’d return before next winter. Hopefully he’d gone straight to his cat witcher.

“You can stay as long as you want,” Vesemir said as they watched Lambert ride away.

Eskel found Geralt in his own room that evening.

“You’re packing,” Eskel pointed out, which was good, because Geralt hadn’t realized that’s what he was doing. He’d started with some vague notion of organizing, but glancing at the piles of armor, weapons, and alchemy supplies around the room, he’d been grouping items by saddlebag.

“We’re witchers,” Geralt said. “Witchers hunt monsters.”

“There are few enough of us left, if we decide that witchers don’t hunt monsters, who will argue?”

“And what will we do instead? Hide out in the mountains for years at a time?”

“I can think of a few things.”

Geralt let himself think of those things for several long minutes. They’d had sleepy morning sex just before breakfast, Eskel waking Geralt with a chaste kiss and rolling them to their sides. The two of them ended up rutting together sleepily until they reached completion, like the boys they’d been a century ago discovering the simple pleasure of skin on skin. Sex still left Geralt feeling vulnerable, maybe it always would, but he usually shook it off with a couple of deep breaths and an embrace from Eskel.

“We’ll do those things again,” Geralt promised, looking up at Eskel from where he sat on the edge of his bed. “I want to do other things too.”

The truth was, Geralt liked his job. He liked travelling to new places and going back to familiar places to mark the passing of the years. He liked saving people, hunting monsters. He liked being good at what he did.

He needed to know if he still was.

Eskel walked out of the room without another word.

Geralt didn’t see him the next day or the day after that. He could leave, his feet practically itched with the need to move, but riding away from Eskel for a century had taught him how much it hurt them both.

It was Vesemir who gave them the answer. He appeared in the courtyard where Geralt was soaping Scorpion’s tack for Eskel as unspoken penance, dragging Eskel by the elbow.

Geralt stood just in time for Vesemir to shove Eskel at him, take them both by the back of their heads, and slam their foreheads together.

“Ow!” Eskel said. Geralt was too grateful to be breathing Eskel’s scent to complain.

“Idiots,” Vesemir said. “Leave, but stay together. We’ve been absent from the world long enough, no doubt you will find work enough for two.”

“For a while, maybe,” Eskel said. “But the Path is only wide enough for one.”

“Then we will walk in each other’s footsteps when we must,” Geralt said.

Eskel choked on the rest of his argument. “The bard was good for you,” he said, and then winced.

Geralt felt his lips twitch. “He was.” He still missed Jaskier, but the pain of losing him had faded enough to let him feel other things as well. He was grateful for what the bard had taught him.

They left together the next day, Also Roach trotting along behind them as they went.

The next few weeks set the pattern for the season. They quickly discovered that bandits, random monsters and wolves hesitated to pick a fight with two witchers. And if they did attack, Eskel and Geralt dispatched them easily. No one had ever taught them how to fight as a unit, but once Geralt convinced Eskel that it would work best if they mostly stayed out of each other’s way, their fighting styles clicked. They knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses well enough after decades of sparring to compensate for them.

When they reached a town, Eskel would ride down to check the notice board, insisting he was less likely to start a fight or stumble into another man’s problems than Geralt. They usually divided the contracts between them, agreeing to meet up a few days later. Occasionally, they worked bigger jobs together, though they seldom told the people who posted the contracts that.

Between contracts, they camped under the stars. Geralt spent the evenings working with Also Roach, getting her accustomed to a halter and tack while Eskel scribbled in his journal.

At midsummer, they ran into Lambert in Oxenfurt. 

“Look at you two happy fucks,” Lambert said, embracing them both. He smelled like he’d been drinking for a few hours, but seemed tan, healthy and happy himself.

They drank themselves stupid at the midsummer’s celebration, woke in a confusing pile of partially clothed bodies that included Lambert, and spent a full day recuperating in their darkened room.

Over a thin gruel the next morning, Lambert pulled out the contracts he’d collected at the notice board. Puffing up his chest like one of their long-dead history teachers, he adjusted invisible spectacles on his nose and began to distribute the papers.

“Eskel, your favorite: succubus in Karsten,” he said with an exaggerated eyebrow waggle. “I think I’ll take the earth elemental loose in the ruins, and it’s harpies along the coast for the great white ferret.”

“Fuck you, Lambert,” Geralt said, kicking his shin under the table.

“Two weeks,” Eskel said. “We meet outside of Novigrad in two weeks. And you stay away from the notice boards and the, the crying widows. Promise me, Wolf.”

Geralt rolled his eyes. He’d been walking the Path for nearly a century without Eskel’s constant supervision. He’d have to figure out how to do it again eventually.

He elbowed Eskel's side in lieu of making any promises he wouldn’t keep.

* * *

The harpy contract sounded easy enough from the notice. If Geralt had been human, someone who merited an actual burial with an actual headstone, he would have wanted “It sounded easy enough” carved on it.

He waited until the lord offering the bounty came down to the market to mediate a dispute, not wanting to risk walking alone into the man’s territory. When Geralt approached he seemed genuine enough, didn’t sneer, offered a fair bounty.

But he wouldn’t pay unless the witcher attended the ball he was throwing.

The harpy colony had grown large on the fringing islands off the coast before migrating across the channel. Now they were wreaking havoc on livestock and travelers for leagues in either direction. Geralt could wait until after he rejoined the other witchers to do the contract, letting the harpies harass and kill people for days or weeks in the meantime. Or he could strap on his swords and do his damn job like he wasn’t afraid of his own shadow.

Geralt waited until dusk, his sharpest time of day and their weakest, kneeling in a meditative pose and pushing any thought of collecting on the contract out of his mind.

The fight itself was long but not particularly difficult. Harpies were weak. Even in a flock of this size, Geralt could control them with aard, blowing them back whenever they threatened to overwhelm him and dealing with them in smaller groups.

Now Geralt just had to collect the coin.

Geralt considered skipping town once he’d dealt with the danger to the countryside. But he’d done the footwork this time, spending days talking to the lord’s vassals and eavesdropping in the local inn. This man had a reputation for kindness. The most dangerous thing at the ball tonight was going to be Geralt, and he was most likely to hurt himself. 

Meditation helped. Geralt set up his camp on the edge of the lord’s estate and knelt in a sunny clearing, Roach and Also Roach cropping the grass in widening circles around him as the shadows grew longer. By nightfall he was jittery but clear-headed. He reached for the buckles of his chest piece in preparation for changing into something less threatening but didn’t get any farther than clutching his medallion, thinking of all the times Eskel had used it as a handhold to keep him from drifting away. Eventually he stalked over to the estate in all his gear.

The ball was outdoors in a well-maintained courtyard garden lit by glowing magelight. The guards standing on either side of the gate nodded to him without making any move to take his weapons. Whispers rippled around him like trailing wake as he moved through the crowd, but the usual vitriol was muted.

He had just parked himself next to a table laden with fruits and wines when the chamberlain appeared at his elbow. Geralt’s already tight shoulders jumped up another notch.

“My lord begs the witcher’s forgiveness,” the man smiled indulgently. “He has been detained on a matter of some urgency but will grant you a private audience by evening’s end.”

Geralt growled.

With a hurried half bow, the chamberlain melted back into the crowd.

Yeah, he didn’t need the money that badly. Geralt grabbed an apple off the table and cut towards the gates by the shortest path, straight across the unused dance floor.

A familiar descending swirl of music froze him in his tracks.

Jaskier floated into the courtyard with his lute, playing the fast-paced, lilting refrain he used to break up conversation between and before his sets (“My theme, Geralt”). He spun on to the dance floor and staggered to a stop with a screech of his hand across his lute strings.

“Geralt.”

The witcher swallowed with a dry click.

The bard looked good. His navy, silver-trimmed doublet and hose had the crisp color and square seams of a new garment. Summer had dusted his nose with freckles and given healthy color to his cheeks. In the soft evening half-light, his eyes were intensely blue, deep enough for Geralt to fall into.

Jaskier recovered first. “My lords and ladies, it is my pleasure to present the white wolf, Geralt of Rivia.” He swept a theatrical arm at Geralt.

Geralt bared his teeth at the room in an attempt at a smile and was surprised when several people returned the expression with considerably more enthusiasm. A handful of ladies even curtsied.

“I fear they’ve heard far too many of my tales of you,” Jaskier said.

“All lies,” Geralt said, picking up their familiar banter as if they didn’t have two years and a couple of broken hearts between them.

Fidgeting with the tuning pegs of his lute, Jaskier gave Geralt a smile that didn’t crinkle the corners of his eyes. “You’re better at avoiding me than I thought you’d be.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Sure, yeah.” The faint, omnipresent smell chamomile sharpened as Jaskier stepped closer. “I thought you were dead.”

“I was, briefly.”

Jaskier’s eyebrows came together and he sucked in a breath to reply, but the rising murmur of the crowd behind them cut him off.

“Master Witcher!” their host exclaimed as he hurried across the dance floor. “Ah! I see my ulterior motive in delaying our meeting has borne fruit.”

Geralt just managed not to snarl at him. 

“My lord?” Jaskier asked, stepping back into his old role as Geralt’s filter for the world as if he’d never left it.

“Well, you’ve sung so many songs about the White Wolf, how could I miss an opportunity to reunite you with your muse?”

Jaskier shot Geralt a calculating glance. “And my muse had no hand in this, then?”

Geralt squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. He had no idea why exactly they had imploded so spectacularly, but it was clear Jaskier still harbored him ill-will for it. Geralt wasn’t sure he had the energy to find out why. Not tonight, when he was alone and already on edge.

“Er, not that I know of,” the lord said.

“Then if I might beg my lord’s pardon,” Jaskier said, “And speak privately with the White Wolf for a moment?”

“Of course! Of course.” The young man beamed at them, prouder than a village matchmaker.

Jaskier took a few steps away from Geralt, and looked back with his eyebrows raised.

Geralt rocked from foot to foot. He didn’t want to have this conversation, but he owed the bard a chance to find closure, at least.

Jaskier led him away from the center of the courtyard, to an opening in the hedge that revealed a little rose garden centered around a gently splashing fountain. The noise of the water would hide their conversation from human ears. Jaskier settled on the fountain’s wide stone edge and patted the space beside him. Geralt remained standing. 

“I had hoped for an opportunity to talk about more intimate matters, but I see that you aren’t in the mood. Or more accurately, you’re even less in the mood than usual.”

Crossing his arms over his chest, Geralt shrugged. “Say what you need to say.”

Jaskier sucked in a breath and let it out in a long sigh, his mouth working wordlessly for a moment. It was strange, to see the bard so flustered. “Never mind. Have you seen the contract put out by His Grace Mieszko Piat?”

Geralt shook his head.

Jaskier leaned back on his hands, an affectation that did little to hide the tension in his frame. “His grace asked for you by name, needs your help to break a curse. He’s had copies of the contract posted all over, plastered on every notice board in Velen, on alley walls in Novigrad.”

“Who’s Mieszko Piat?” Geralt asked.

“Really, Geralt? I suppose I should be gratified that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t hold your attention, but this is just embarrassing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How many men have you slept with, that their names are so easily forgotten?”

Eskel and Jaskier, those were the only two men he’d slept with, though he’d bedded considerably more women. They were safer, less likely to take what they wanted by force or coercion.

“Foolish of me, but I thought you’d remember this one. If only for what he did to us, a friendship of many years destroyed by one night…” Jaskier’s voice faded into the silence wrapping itself around Geralt.

Geralt had finally figured out who Mieszko Piat was. He’d never known the duke’s name, hadn’t bothered to learn it before because he didn’t care, didn’t want to know it after because having a name made a monster into a common man.

“…Geralt? Hey! You’re scaring me here.”

Geralt dragged his attention back to Jaskier. The bard had got to his feet and pushed into Geralt’s space without him noticing. Even now, his body didn’t register Jaskier as a threat.

“I’m sorry,” Geralt said. “For everything I didn’t have the strength to hold on to with you.”

Jaskier’s mouth fell open. “I thought I’d relish forcing that out of you, but turns out, not so much. Not when you suddenly look like you’re half a potion away from going toxic.”

“I’m sorry,” Geralt repeated with more force. This time he was apologizing for what he was about to do, because Jaskier would want him to stay, would want answers. But he could not stay here, fenced in by this nobleman’s casual wealth and among these strangers, not for a moment longer.

Slipping around Jaskier, Geralt sprinted towards the garden wall. He scrambled up the roughhewn stone and vaulted into the darkness without looking back.


	9. The contract

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A curse, a contract, and a conversation or two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: mentions of past assault, difficult conversations, mild body horror (not a main character). 
> 
> Alright. If you're still here, I assume you trust me, at least a little. Please keep trusting me. I'm not going to make anyone do anything squicky. 
> 
> Sorry this is late. Rough day. And I struggled with this chapter. Ugh. *tosses chapter at the audience and runs away*

Geralt tried to meditate at his camp for a few hours, but half-remembered horrors and the renewed pain of losing Jaskier made it impossible to concentrate. He gave it up an hour before midnight and went into the nearest town. The barkeep at the local tavern had been friendly enough to Geralt. If he couldn’t handle this like Vesemir or Eskel, he would tackle it like Lambert and get absolutely shit-faced.

The tavern was quiet, the kind of quiet that made Geralt suspicious. He hovered in the doorway. The barkeep looked up with a smile, his shoulders slumping in relief.

Geralt took a backwards step out of the tavern.

“Ah Master Geralt, good. The lord’s guards delivered your bounty, and I won’t lie, it was fair burnin’ a hole in my apron pocket.”

That could explain the emptiness of the room; guards tended to put a damper on any good tavern crowd. When they were on duty, at least.

“He also paid your tab in full, since his own hospitality weren’t to your liking. And my friend, witcher or not, you could not possibly drink your way through his line o’ credit.” The man plunked down a ragged line of shot glasses and began pouring.

It was too good to resist.

Geralt was a dozen shots in when he discovered why.

“Some coping mechanisms never change, I see,” a familiar voice said at his elbow.

Squinting around at the bard, Geralt scowled.

“No,” he said, holding up a forbidding finger to the most solid of the three wavering Jaskiers beside him. “Just, no.”

“Come now Geralt, you can’t think I’ll let you get away after a reaction like that. That was, well. That was excessive, even given how badly the whole Duke Piat thing ended.”

“Thing.” Geralt repeated hollowly.

Jaskier ignored him. “For that matter, when have I ever let you get away?”

“You left me,” Geralt said.

“I didn’t want to!” Jaskier said. He reached for Geralt’s shoulder, then dropped his hand back to his side. “I couldn’t stay with someone who thought so little of me, not again. Not when it was you.”

Geralt turned to glare at the bard. “What.”

“You were unfaithful, Geralt; you didn’t even bother to hide it. I can’t think of a clearer way to say ‘I don’t care about you’.”

“Unfaithful.” Geralt’s wrestled with his alcohol-soaked brain. “Because…Eskel?”

“Not Eskel,” Jaskier gave him a tentative half smile, “I’m glad you have Eskel. And anyway, I knew about him before.” That was true, Jaskier had seen what lay between the two witchers from the few stunted sentences Geralt had offered about his oldest friend. Jaskier had even encouraged Geralt to act on it.

“I don’t understand!” Geralt hissed, slamming down an empty shot glass.

Jaskier shook his head. “How can you not? You—”

The door to the tavern burst open. An enormous figure, hooded and draped in folds of dark cloak, ducked into the room and looked around. Animal eyeshine flashed from the shadows of his hood, but his lurching gait had no predatory grace. The boots on his feet were lumpy and misshapen, as if his ankles had been broken and healed wrong. A strong wave of wet dog smell drifted through the room.

“Thank the gods I’ve found you,” the figure growled out. He pawed the hood of his cloak back from his face.

“Mikel,” Geralt said.

The young captain of the guard’s face was a craggy mess of scruffy hair and leathery skin. His jaw was longer than when last Geralt had seen him, deformed around a bulging mouth.

All told, he wasn’t looking exactly human.

“ _This_ is Mikel?” Jaskier asked. “The captain of Duke Piat’s guards?”

Mikel swallowed hard and bowed deeply to them both. “Master Witcher. I’m glad to see you. I’m glad to see you well.”

“What happened to you?” Jaskier asked.

“Looks like some kind of curse,” Geralt said. He thought about that for minute. “Oh.”

Mikel tottered over to their table and fell onto the bench across from Geralt. “I can't blame you for not answering His Grace’s contract. But we hoped if you knew the true extent of the curse on our lands, you might be swayed.”

“There are other witchers,” Jaskier said. He didn’t sound convinced by his own argument.

“Would that any witcher could break this curse,” Mikel said. “That’s not the reason I sought you out. Over the years, there have been many that…His Grace has…”

“Tortured, raped, and murdered?” Geralt asked.

“What?!” Jaskier asked, one hand flying up to clutch his chest.

Mikel’s massive shoulders sunk. “I fear very few have survived catching His Grace’s attention. Only one that I know of, in fact.”

“I’m too drunk for this,” Geralt said. “Or not drunk enough.”

“One of the women who was…killed…by His Grace, had a sister—”

“I’m sure they all had families,” Geralt spat. He wrapped his hand around his medallion and thought of Eskel’s arms around him. Eskel, who had kept him away from notice boards all summer, the overprotective bastard.

“—this one was a sorceress. She cursed us all. For every blow he rained down on another, for every wound he inflicted, one of his vassals would turn into a beast. ‘A monster for every evidence of his monstrous nature.’”

“That’s…poetic,” Jaskier said weakly. “Horrible. But poetic.”

Mikel talked over him. “It will take all the men in the duchy. Dozens have lost themselves already, slaughtered their own families before disappearing to haunt the wilds around our settlements.”

“And the duke?” Jaskier asked.

“Still has a man’s mind, unlike the rest of us. But he’s trapped inside a twisted body all the same.”

“You thought I’d help this monster, after what he did.” Geralt said.

Mikel bit his lip with a canine-sharp incisor. “You’re the only one who can break the curse.”

“Really? Because this sounds like an excellent job for a sorcerer or druid,” Jaskier said. “We know dozens of them.”

“The phrasing of the curse leaves no room for doubt, it is painted on the castle’s walls in blood that will not wash away: ‘Seek absolution in one who hath suffered at the monster’s hands.’ And…well. No one else survived him.”

“Fuck,” Geralt said.

“No,” Jaskier said. “No, no. The duke hurt us, but he didn’t—” he stuttered to a stop, his gaze ticking over Geralt’s face. Whatever he saw there made him bite his lip. “No. It can’t be. Tell him, Geralt. Tell him the duke didn’t hurt you like that.”

Geralt felt as if his feet had been kicked out from under him. Jaskier had always treated Geralt like a person, a person who felt pain and happiness and sadness, maybe differently from most men, but no less than them. And Geralt, fool that he was, had believed that whatever came between them couldn’t change that.

“It hurt, Jaskier.” The words tumbled from his lips as if pulled out by Axii. “Maybe not like it would have hurt you, I didn’t scream or cry, I can’t. But it hurt to go to my knees for him, to bend over for him. It still fucking hurts.”

Jaskier staggered as if Geralt had struck him. “That’s not what happened. That can’t be what happened.”

“His Grace used you as leverage, Master Jaskier. I’m sorry.” Mikel fidgeted in his seat.

Chest heaving, Jaskier grabbed Geralt’s sleeve. “That’s not what happened! You pushed me away. We were starting to get close and it scared you, and you used the duke to drive a wedge between us.”

It did sound like something Geralt would do. Something he had done to Jaskier in the past, even. But he hadn’t, not this time.

“You thought I was unfaithful,” he stated, finally understanding. “With the asshole duke.”

Tears spilled down Jaskier’s face. “The guards who escorted me out, they said he just whispered in your ear and you fell into his bed.”

“They lied,” Mikel said. “To you and themselves. And the lie was easier to believe than the truth.”

Geralt shook his head. “But I told you. It wasn’t what you thought.”

“You didn’t tell me he raped you!”

Geralt snarled. He hated that word. “You knew. You blamed me for not resisting.”

“Geralt, fuck.” Jaskier’s hands twisted on Geralt’s sleeve. “When I said you hadn’t resisted, I thought you gave in to his seduction! I thought you hadn’t fought the temptation to stray. I didn’t mean that you…urk.”

Jaskier gagged and swooned, collapsing onto a nearby bench.

“Hmm.” Geralt said. He felt exhausted and dull, as if he’d run the walls on the slippery footing of midwinter. Twice.

“I’m so sorry,” Jaskier gasped. He was panting, his mouth gaping like a fish, but he raised one hand to Geralt in supplication. “Gods, Geralt. I’ll never be able to say it enough. I’m so sorry.”

“What if I can’t?” Geralt asked Mikel. “What if I can’t forgive him for what he did?”

“I saw what you were like when he…I had hoped that perhaps because you are a witcher, and everyone says witchers feel differently, not like regular men do—”

“You thought it would be easier to forgive because the pain was lesser.”

“I hoped,” Mikel said.

Geralt thought of Kaer Morhen’s icy stones of beneath his bare knees, the shrieking wind biting into his skin and stealing his life away. How he had preferred that agony to a lifetime of silently bearing up under this pain. How sometimes, he still did.

“No,” he told Mikel. “That’s not how it works.”

Mikel scrunched his eyes closed. “Then I’m doubly sorry. At the very least, we will need a witcher to clear the countryside when the curse has run its course.”

“You’re hiring me to kill you.”

“It hurts,” Mikel said, staring at his clawed hands, “Changing from man to monster.”

Geralt knocked back another shot. “Can’t argue with that,” he said around the lump in his throat.

* * *

Geralt tried to leave Jaskier behind. A cursed castle ruled by a cursed creature in the center of several leagues of cursed lands was not a good place for a human.

Jaskier followed, of course.

“How much trouble can I possibly be?” Jaskier asked, jogging along at Roach’s stirrup with his lute banging on his back. “You’re already going to be protecting Mikel. What’s one more human to protect?”

“At least twice as much work?” Mikel asked.

“More like ten times,” Geralt said.

“I will follow you, whether you want me to or not, and it will be way more work to gather up my dismembered bits and bury them than it would be to just take me with you.”

“Who says I’d bother burying you?” Geralt asked, but he was already swinging down from Roach. He knelt and boosted the bard into the saddle.

“What…” Jaskier started.

“We don't have time to argue,” Geralt said. They set off, Geralt jogging at the front to set the pace and the horses trotting side by side behind him. Geralt had left Also Roach in town, not wanting a loose, partially trained horse complicating the situation.

“This is the edge of our lands,” Mikel said a few hours later, reining in the placid draft horse he’d been clinging to awkwardly. “Beyond this point, the way is fraught with danger.”

“How far do we have yet to go?” Jaskier asked.

“A day, if we ride hard and aren’t accosted.”

“So, at least two,” Geralt said with a scowl.

“Do we charge through, or go slowly, clearing the way?” Jaskier asked.

“Every monster you kill was once a man and will be again when we break the curse,” Mikel said.

“If we break the curse,” Geralt said. “If we don’t, we’ll have to kill them on the way out anyway.”

“It’s going to be hard not to kill them,” Jaskier said. “Maybe we should get help? What about Eskel?”

Geralt blew out a breath that ruffled his fringe. Eskel. “He doesn’t trust me to do this. He’ll only try to stop us.”

Jaskier winced.

“We rest tonight,” Geralt said. “Tomorrow, we charge through. I’ll only fight when I can’t avoid it, and I’ll fight to incapacitate.”

They settled down for the night around a meager campfire just off the road. In the distance, they could hear the howls of wolves and worse.

Mikel offered to take the first watch. Geralt would have little opportunity to rest between here and the duke’s castle, so he accepted the offer despite wanting to control every aspect of their safety.

That left Geralt and Jaskier stretched out next to each in pregnant silence.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Geralt said.

“We might not get another chance,” Jaskier said.

He heard Mikel get up and move a little further into the woods, no doubt to give them the illusion of privacy.

“How could talking possibly help?” Geralt asked.

“Things get twisted around in our heads sometimes,” Jaskier said. There was a whisper of cloth in the darkness as he rolled towards Geralt. “Other people can help us straighten it out. I need help straightening it all out.”

“Hmm.”

“And I owe you an apology, or ten. They’d be more effective if I knew what I was apologizing for.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I’d like to give you everything anyway.”

Geralt shook his head, but a smile twitched onto his lips.

Jaskier took a deep breath. “Mikel said Duke Piat used me as leverage?”

“So I wouldn’t fight back,” Geralt told the sky. It was a perfectly clear, moonless summer night, the stars alone bright enough to read by. “He probably heard witchers don’t feel pain and wanted to prove the rumor wrong.”

Jaskier sniffled. The scent of tears filled the campsite, strong enough to overpower even the smoke of their fire.

“Didn’t react the way he wanted. He switched to humiliation.” Geralt wrapped one hand around his medallion to ground himself. 

“That's just a different kind of pain. It was not your fault,” Jaskier said with steel in his tone despite his tears.

Geralt sighed. “He had too many guards.”

Jaskier was silent for a moment while he put together what Geralt meant. “That’s why you didn’t want to go into the ballroom. You thought there might be trouble.”

“One reason. Also, I hate parties.”

Jasker laughed wetly, then swallowed hard. “But you went anyway, because of me. And he hurt you, because of me.”

“I walked into a trap with open eyes. That was my choice.”

“It was not your fault,” Jaskier said, as if repeating it more made it true.

Geralt shook his head, the little rocks and twigs beneath his bedroll digging into the back of his skull.

“Then you came back to me,” Jaskier continued, “And instead of offering comfort, I accused you of being complicit in your own assault. Gods, I’m so sorry. I don’t blame you for what happened, not at all.”

“I blame me.” Geralt cut off the start of Jaskier’s protestation. “And I would _never_ deliberately betray you _._ You’re worth more than that.”

“Scores of men and women across the continent would disagree. I’m the musical interlude of their lives, not the main theme. And it just hurt so godsdamn much to think we’d end the same way. I thought we were different.”

Geralt shrugged. “We were.”

“Yeah.” Jaskier hiccuped and sniffled again. “Until I fucked it up.”

“Not by yourself. I didn’t explain.”

“I saw your pain and thought it was guilt, and I lashed out. I didn’t give you the chance explain."

“Wouldn’t have found the words anyway.”

“I should have given you a chance to try. I’m so sorry.”

A shooting star arced across the sky just above the horizon. The fire popped and sputtered. Geralt forced himself to unclench his hand from around his medallion before he broke the skin of his palm.

“Did this help?” Geralt asked.

“It hurt,” Jaskier said. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t help.”

“Like stretching a sore muscle.” For the first time since they lay down, Geralt turned his head to look at Jaskier.

The bard was still crying, but he smiled at Geralt. Geralt tried to smile back. He was pretty sure he wasn't entirely successful, but Jaskier's face lit up anyway. 


	10. The curse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Geralt and Jaskier set out to break a curse and get some last minute help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: victim denial, canon-typical violence, arguments, difficult conversations...explosive monster corpses (honestly not too much trauma here)
> 
> Thanks for all your support yesterday, I was well on my way to hating that chapter. I posted it, hid from the internet, and woke up to all your lovely comments. So THANK YOU. Can't thank you enough...so here's the next chapter!

It took three days for them to work their way through the duke’s lands. Werecreatures stalked the roads, werewolves and werecats attacking at all hours of the day and night. Geralt tried to spare as many as possible, knowing they were innocent men cursed by association, but his mercy slowed their progress to a crawl. The attacks grew more frequent the closer they came to the center of the curse.

By the time they reached the settlement beneath the duke’s keep, they were exhausted and suffering from a variety of minor wounds.

“Let’s seek shelter at the barracks,” Mikel suggested. Unable to make his increasingly twisted limbs bend the correct way, he’d given up riding astride and was slung over his saddle like a sack of grain.

Night had fallen. The houses lining the streets remained dark and silent, but for an orange glow here and there where the remains of a building still smoldered. Shadows moved in the dark, claws scrabbling on cobbles as rats and other carrion eaters scattered at their approach.

“Rotfiends won’t be far,” Geralt said to Jaskier.

“Wonderful. Because an entire cursed duchy wasn’t enough fun,” Jaskier said.

Geralt grunted in agreement and picked up their pace. Unlike the transformed villagers, who attacked alone and at random, rotfiends moved in packs.

They turned a corner into an open square and the solid bulk of the barracks rose above them, a walled complex of buildings crouching against the castle wall. The gate was closed.

The hair on the back of Geralt's neck rose as they crossed the empty space, coming to stop in the shadow of the looming building. Mikel slid from his horse and stumbled up to the gate, slamming his fist on the door with enough force to rattle it on its hinges.

“Open the gate! I’ve brought the witcher.”

There was no reply from the other side of the wall.

Geralt focused his hearing. For the first time since entering town, he heard signs of human life: snatches of conversation, the clank of a spoon against the side of a pot, a boot scraping on stone.

He could also hear gurgling from across the courtyard behind them.

“Adam, damn it, hurry up,” Mikel yelled.

“Adam isn’t here no more, boy,” a woman’s voice called from above them.

They stepped back and craned their necks upwards. Torchlight bloomed on top of the wall, lighting the faces of two women standing there. Both wore dresses of stained, home-woven fabric and had identical looks of determination on their faces. The one holding a pitchfork like a spear leaned out over the waist-high stone to look down at them.

“Zofia?” Mikel. “What happened to Adam? He showed no signs of changing when I left.”

“Don’t rightly know. He’s out there somewhere.” Zofia gestured to the hollowed-out town and the woods beyond. A werewolf howled in the distance.

“They all are,” the woman at her side said, crossing her arms over her chest. Slighter than Zofia, she held a meat cleaver in her right hand with the grip of a knife fighter.

“Lena, has everyone has fallen to the curse?” Mikel fell to his knees.

Both women shrugged. “They will eventually.”

“Hang on,” Jaskier interjected. “You mean to tell me you have closed your gates to the entire town? The entire duchy?”

“Of course not, peacock,” Zofia drawled. “Just the men. The men are the ones turning, tearing up their womenfolk, eating their own babes straight from the cradle.”

“We pulled together thems that was left,” Lena said. “Shut ourselves up in here with our grain and your well, intendin’ to let you finish each other off.”

“It’s not a terrible plan,” Geralt said. He understood the inclination to shut everyone out. 

“They’re punishing innocents for crimes they may never commit!” Mikel argued.

Zofia spat, a thick glob of mucus that landed right at the captain’s knees. “We’re not shieldmaidens from Skellige, raised from the tit with a sword in one hand. We’re housewives fightin’ with kitchen knives and farm tools.”

“They can’t hurt us if we lock them all out first,” Lena finished.

“You’re only hurting yourselves by locking everyone out,” Jaskier said. “We could put an end to this, save your menfolk, break this siege before you run out of supplies.

“How?” Zofia asked.

“The words of the curse,” Mikel recited, “‘Seek absolution in one who hath suffered at the monster’s hands.’ The witcher has suffered at His Grace’s hands.”

“What, him?” The two women leaned over the wall again to squint at Geralt the darkness. “Doesn’t really look like His Gracious Asshole’s type.”

Geralt chanced a look over his shoulder. At least a dozen gurgling rotfiends had gathered in the shadows on the other side of the square. Geralt growled. “We’re here to break the curse. You want to see the scars he left on my ass, you’re going to have to let us in.”

The women recoiled, exchanging a glance. 

Flames flared few blocks away, another house catching fire, lighting the sky with an eerie orange glow. The rotfiends were getting bolder, darting towards the barracks and away erratically, each pass getting closer as their confidence grew. He couldn’t easily estimate their numbers anymore.

Geralt put himself between them and Jaskier as Mikel continued to shout at the women up on the wall.

“That’s a lot of rotfiends, Geralt,” Jaskier said.

“Hmm,” Geralt said as he rubbed necrophage oil on his blade. “Stay behind me.”

The seething mass of humanoid monsters had passed the midpoint of the square. Perhaps if he hadn’t already fought his way across the countryside, hadn’t already spent three days burning through his magical and physical energy, they would have had a chance. Perhaps he should have sought out Eskel after all. 

“If we die here, I want you to know…” Jaskier began. 

“If you apologize to me again I will hit you.”

“Hah. Ok. Well, then. Carry on."

Focusing on the rotfiends, Geralt clutched his medallion in his casting hand. _I’m sorry, Esk. I’m sorry I’m taking our future from you._

A blast of orange flame tore into the plaza, taking out a dozen rotfiends at the back of the pack. The air sang with the sound of swords slicing through flesh, accompanied by the percussive explosions of dancing star bombs.

“What…?” Mikel asked.

A column of blue light cut through the center of the necrophages. Eskel sprinted through the gap he’d created with Aard and skittered to a stop next to Geralt.

“Wolf. Throwing yourself headfirst into the deepest shit, as usual.” He smiled at Geralt.

“Eskel. How?”

“Later. Can’t leave all the fun to Lambert and his cat.”

Eskel cast a Quen on them both. Together, they waded into the fray.

Geralt forgot his earlier exhaustion. Buoyed by the sudden arrival of the other witchers, he danced back and forth at Eskel’s right hand, covering the side not protected by his powerful signs. Gouts of bomb dust and flashes of Aard from the other side of the courtyard marked the position of Lambert and his cat. He and Eskel hacked their way towards them, the two pairs of witchers crushing the necrophages between them.

They reduced the rotfiends to a field of dismembered limbs within a matter of minutes. The last one died with a strangled howl and exploded in a wet splat.

“Hate that they do that,” Eskel commented, wiping spatter off his face.

Geralt grinned at Eskel over his dripping blade, slowly straightening out of his fighting crouch. Eskel smiled back, a boyishly sweet expression on a man spattered with gore and smelling strongly of ozone-crisp magic.

Lambert saluted them both and wiped his sword on the trousers of the witcher at his side. The cat witcher had the darker skin of a southerner, his bare arms a dramatic contrast to his loose, jewel-toned breeches and brightly polished chest-plate. His open, handsome face was framed by a wavy mop of brown hair. The smile he bestowed on Geralt was uncertain but had real warmth.

“Wow,” Jaskier said. “That was, wow.”

The four witchers turned as one to the bard. He and Mikel were still standing with the horses at the closed barracks gate. The wall above them had sprouted at least a dozen more witnesses besides Zofia and Lena.

Geralt tugged Eskel by his elbow towards the gate, Lambert and his cat automatically flanking them. “Jaskier, my brothers: Eskel, Lambert and Aiden.”

The cat flashed Geralt a surprised grin.

“This is Jaskier.” Eskel said. His fingers flexed on his sword hilt. Aiden and Lambert regarded the bard with identically tilted heads. No one moved to sheath their blades.

Jaskier cleared his throat and fidgeted. Apparently even the bard’s stunted self-preservation instinct registered that they were one or two unhappy witchers past a dangerous situation.

“Scrawnier than I pictured,” Lambert remarked to the Aiden, who hummed thoughtfully.

Jaskier bowed. “It is a pleasure to meet you at last. Geralt has spoken of you, uh…not often, per se. But occasionally when very drunk and always with much fondness.”

“Hmm,” Eskel said. He looked down his nose at Jaskier and told a bald-faced lie. “He doesn’t speak of you at all.”

The bard’s spine straightened. “I think you are laboring under a misunderstanding I’ve already had the opportunity to correct with Geralt.”

Eskel’s fists clenched at his sides. “You took him back?” he asked Geralt. “Just like that?”

Geralt gave a noncommittal shrug. “It was a misunderstanding.”

“Helluva misunderstanding,” Lambert said.

Eskel glared at Jaskier. “You told him the assault was his fault, for not fighting back hard enough.”

Aiden winced. “That’s fucked up.”

The women clustered on the walls murmured.

“Do we have to do this now?” Geralt asked, ducking his head and kicking aside a stray rotfiend arm.

“Let’s not let it fester,” Jaskier said, tilting his chin up. “I have apologized to Geralt.”

A ball of flame ignited around Eskel’s left hand with a puff. “So it’s all forgiven and forgotten? You discarded him when he needed you most.”

“I was protecting myself. I thought he had been unfaithful.”

“Ooo,” Lambert said. “I know we agreed to keep Eskel from killing the bard, but I’m reevaluating.”

“Unfaithful?! That wasn’t…he was forced!” The edges of Eskel’s sleeve began to blacken. Geralt grabbed his elbow and pulled the flaming arm away from his body.

“I know that now! But as I told you, Geralt and I have talked about it. You have no right to interject yourself.”

Eskel’s face twisted like he’d caught the scent of a nekker nest. “He died, bard. Knelt outside in a snowstorm until he froze to death. I had his still heart under my hands, and I brought him back to life—"

“We brought him back to life,” Lambert said. “It was gross. Had to make out with his corpse for like an hour. So I think you’ll find, _you_ have no right.”

“What?” Jaskier shot Geralt a horrified look.

Geralt shrugged. It wasn’t like they’d had much free time in the past three days and ‘By the way, I tried to kill myself’ was pretty hard to slip into casual conversation.

“He traded himself for you.” Eskel raised his burning hand to point at Jaskier. “It was your fault.”

“It was not Jaskier’s fault.” Geralt grabbed Eskel’s wrist, pulling the tail of his undershirt out and using it to smother the flames on Eskel’s hand.

“No, it wasn’t,” a voice called from the top of the wall. Zofia leaned out over them. She gestured to the castle looming above the barracks. “It’s his fault. The duke did this, him and them that let him. Do you really think you can break the curse?”

Geralt shrugged. “No.”

“Geralt,” Jaskier said, smacking his own forehead.

“I don’t. But I think I have to try.” He would never forgive himself if he left these people to suffer without trying.

Zofia snorted. “Good enough, I guess. Let ‘em in before the next wave of corpse-eaters comes.”

* * *

A refugee camp had sprung up in the courtyard on the other side of the barracks gate. The building’s central courtyard was crammed with people. Dozens of dirty women and children sat or lay listlessly beneath canvas tents erected in a haphazard semicircle around several cookfires. Hollow eyes in blank faces turned to watch their arrival.

The gates shut behind them. The witchers looked around at each other, eyes roaming over tears in armor and skin, reading the story of the past few days in the blood and gore painting them from head to toe.

Lambert broke first. Ignoring their audience, he strode over to Geralt and clasped his hand. He held it for barely a heartbeat before smashing himself against Geralt in a hug. His cat witcher looked on with the same unbearably soft look Geralt caught occasionally on Eskel’s face.

“Lamb,” Geralt said, darting a look at the humans watching them with new interest.

“Shut up, pretty boy. Life is too short to worry what these assholes think.”

Eskel’s shoulders sagged. He snatched Geralt out of Lambert’s arms and engulfed him in a bear hug, burying his face in Geralt’s neck.

Geralt hugged Eskel back and snarled at the women watching them. Eyebrows rose and a few lips quirked upwards. Possibly it was hard to look intimidating when clinging to another man like a limpet.

“How’d you know?” Geralt asked Eskel, when it became clear no one intended to start screaming at the sight of witchers having emotions.

Eskel shrugged and burrowed his face deeper into Geralt’s curtain of hair. “My medallion. I spent half a day looking for a cursed object in my campsite before I realized the humming was directional, that it was tied to you.”

“That’s new. Of course, I’ve never seen your hand catch fire either.”

Eskel squeezed once more before letting go of Geralt.

Geralt squinted at him and then punched him in the side, hard.

“Ow,” Eskel wheezed. “The fuck was that for?”

“Lying to me all summer. ‘Stay away from the notice boards, Geralt,’ ‘I’ll ask around town, Geralt.’ You’ve known about this—” he waved at Mikel, shaking on his deformed feet “—for months.”

“You shouldn’t have to deal with this, Geralt,” Eskel said, rubbing his side. “We were just trying to protect you.”

“They thought you’d go riding off to save the bastard,” Aiden said.

“Which you did, you masochist,” Lambert said, shaking a finger at Geralt. Geralt punched him too.

“Do we get to punch you for running off without us?” Eskel asked with narrowed eyes.

“Maybe we can try not using violence as a form of communication?” Jaskier asked.

“I suppose that explains why you didn't answer the contract,” Zofia said. She’d descended from the wall and stood a few paces away with a wedge of stout, grim women arrayed behind her.

One of the old women next to the cookfires stood and hobbled over to them.

“We had a plan Zofia,” the old woman said. “No men. And here you’ve let in five.”

“Most of ‘em are witchers.”

“Witchers have a cock and two balls each, unless some of the wilder rumors are true.”

“Five men?” Jaskier asked, looking around at the six of them.

“Don’t know what he has ‘tween his legs,” the old woman said, jerking her chin at Mikel, “But it surely isn’t balls.”

“I don’t blame you for your anger. But I couldn’t have stopped him, you know that.”

“There’s literally no acceptable reason, not a single one, to let a predator kill unchecked,” Jaskier said.

“Hmph,” the old lady said, almost approvingly. “Well, we may as well feed you. There’s little else we can do.”

Zofia uncrossed her arms and scrubbed her face with both hands. “We can do more. There are tunnels into the keep beneath the barracks. We can guide you through them.”

“What made you change your mind?” Jaskier asked her. “Ten minutes ago, you were all for letting the necrophages tear us limb from limb, now you’re helping us.”

Shaking her head, Zofia looked between Eskel, Jaskier and Geralt. “I know the look of lives ruined by Duke Piat all too well now.”

“Besides,” Lena said, “You’ll never do it without our help. Every man of the duke’s house, every guard, footman, and valet, has turned. The keep is crawlin’ with monsters.”

Eskel turned to face Geralt.

“You are committed to this, Wolf?” Eskel put his hand across the back of Geralt’s neck. “I can’t convince you to mount up and ride hard for the coast?”

Geralt shrugged. He knuckled the worry line between Eskel’s brows, leaving a smudge of blood there like a brand. “It has to be my choice, Esk. And I choose to try.”

“Then we try,” Eskel said.

* * *

Their evening with the duchy’s refugees was an awkward affair. Half the women thought they were going to fail and treated it like their last meal, pushing on them the choicest morsels, chicken and lamb seasoned simply but freshly killed and hearty.

The other half also thought they’d fail but couldn’t care less.

They retired to an unused firepit in the corner of the courtyard as soon as they could, the humans adjusting away unconsciously until they had a circle of empty flagstone around them. Eskel laid out his bedroll on one side of the fire; Jaskier did the same on the other side. Both looked up at Geralt expectantly.

“Lay down and rest Wolf,” Eskel said, patting the space beside him. “I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“There’s room beside me,” Jaskier said. He turned wide, begging eyes on Geralt. “And I haven’t seen you in years.”

Geralt clenched his hands into fists to keep himself from throwing them in the air in exasperation. He ignored them both to crouch beside Aiden and Lambert, who were sitting knee to knee on their shared bedding.

“You two figure your shit out?” Geralt asked Lambert.

Lambert squawked.

“Yes, thanks to you,” Aiden said with an easy smile.

“What?” Lambert asked. “He didn’t do a damn thing.”

“He figured his shit out with Eskel. Leading by example, like a good big brother.”

Lambert’s scowl could have curdled milk. Geralt bared his teeth in a grin, then sobered.

“Maybe not so much,” he said, looking between Eskel and Jaskier, who were now weaponizing their facial expressions.

“You need to sleep, Wolf,” Eskel said without looking away from his staring match with Jaskier. “You know you sleep best with me wrapped around you, protecting you like no one else can.”

Jaskier’s lips pinched. “Or you can sleep beside me, and I will offer you softness no one else has ever given you.”

“They could just get their dicks out and measure,” Lambert said to Aiden.

Geralt threw his hands in the air and stalked off. He went to the top of the wall and had been staring unseeing into the darkness of the ruined countryside for twenty minutes when two sets of footsteps on the stairs interrupted his brooding.

“Come to bed, Wolf. Please.”

“Yes, please. Eskel will guard your rest.” Jaskier gave Geralt a wobbly smile.

“I—What?” Eskel, who had puffed himself up for another round of verbal sparring, deflated.

Jaskier looked at Eskel with wet eyes. “I understand, I failed him. And you didn’t. I wouldn’t forgive that either.”

Eskel swallowed hard. “I didn’t get everything right. I nearly lost him.”

“I am not fucking dead,” Geralt pointed out.

“Because of Eskel,” Jaskier said. “And Lambert. They were there for you, and I was not.”

“I will not choose between you. I will not.” Geralt jabbed them each in the sternum by turns.

“Then don’t,” Eskel said. He took a deep breath. “I said it before, you have a big heart. There’s room enough in it for both of us. If that’s what you want.”

Jaskier sniffled. “What he said.”

“You’re supposed to be the poet.” Eskel frowned at Jaskier.

“And my words are cheap. They must be, lest I spend myself destitute with the multitude that tumbles from my mouth.” Jaskier reached for Geralt, who went statue-still in tense anticipation.

Jaskier’s hand dropped and Geralt swallowed his wounded mewl.

“Oh,” Eskel said. “He thinks you’re too disgusted to touch him. We’ve already worked through that one, so heads up I guess.”

“Dear heart, no,” Jaskier said, now reaching for Geralt with a stricken look on his face. “Can I hug you?”

Geralt nodded wordlessly. Jaskier wrapped one arm around Geralt’s waist, then frowned at Eskel.

“Can I hug you?” Jaskier asked the scarred witcher.

Eskel blinked and looked over his shoulder. “Me? I guess. Wait, why?”

Jaskier very, very slowly wrapped his free arm around Eskel’s waist, pulling the three of them close. “Because the two of you are opposite edges of the same blade; you’re the left hand to Geralt’s right. And I couldn’t love his heart without loving you for your place in it.”

Geralt’s gut clenched painfully. He’d missed Jaskier, his flashes of insight that could cut straight to the core of a tangled emotional situation. He was practically a clairvoyant when his own insecurities didn’t get in the way. He hugged them both back and waited for Eskel to speak.

“Alright, yeah.” Eskel kissed the corner of Geralt’s mouth. “Those were pretty good words. What the bard said.”

They fell asleep that night with Geralt bracketed between them, his nose buried in Eskel’s throat and his back pressed into Jaskier’s chest. If this was his last night on earth, Geralt had no complaints.


	11. Forgiveness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A long-awaited confrontation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: bad guys being bad, mentions of past assault, dissociation.
> 
> SO! Here we are! The end, with an epilogue to follow in a few days. Thank you so much your continued support!! I love reading your comments, seeing you speculate and react! Let me know what you think :-)

The next day, Zofia led them through the maze of passages between the keep and the barracks. The tunnels were narrow and rubble choked, claustrophobic even without the addition of four enormous, heavily armed witchers. Eskel’s shoulders scraped constantly against the walls and even Zofia had to duck often.

After ten minutes of walking, they reached a wall of flat stone. Zofia leaned on a notch in the wall, then glanced back at them. “Ready?” she asked.

Geralt looked around at his friends. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “I don’t know if I can break the curse. I will not blame you if you walk away and live to fight another day. I would be glad of it.”

“Yeah, a little late now,” Lambert said.

“We’re with you, Wolf,” Eskel said, kicking Lambert’s shin.

“Yup.” Jaskier popped the ‘p’. He vibrated in place with nerves, but he met Geralt’s eyes without flinching.

“This is my penance,” Mikel said. “Would that it were enough.”

Geralt rolled his eyes. “Alright. You know the plan. We fight to incapacitate, with the flats of our blades, no bombs or bolts, no Igni.”

“Crazy, I love it,” Aiden said

The air came alive with the hiss of swords being unsheathed.

“Seal the door behind us,” Geralt said to Zofia.

“Of course. You lot are on your own, I won't be coming back for you." She hesitated. "But good luck, witcher."

“Thanks.” Geralt nodded to her. She turned and leaned on the notch in the wall with all her weight. It slid open with a screech of stone on stone.

“So much for the element of surprise,” Lambert said, darting out of the passage with Aiden on his heels. Eskel herded Mikel and Jaskier out. Geralt brought up the rear, slipping through sideways as Zofia began to close the door behind them.

They had arrived in the middle of a wide hallway. Shadows moved on both ends, misshapen creatures that hissed and growled as they approached.

“We’ve got this side,” Lambert said. Aiden nodded, falling into place beside Lambert.

Eskel grunted in acknowledgement and took the other side. Geralt joined him, spinning his blade once before settling into a crouch.

Chaos erupted.

Geralt and Eskel fought like one man as half a dozen werewolves and a handful of werecats attacked. Geralt danced around their enemies, striking them with the flat of his silver blade and wearing down their endurance while Eskel cast Yrden and Axii to slow them. Once a monster had been incapacitated Mikel or Jaskier darted in to secure it, using rope Eskel had scavenged for that purpose from the barracks. Behind them, Aiden and Lambert worked their side of the hallway in much the same way, protecting their backs as they forced their way deeper into the keep.

Their progress was incremental. They’d entered the tunnels at dawn, but bright sunlight was pouring through the windows by the time they stumbled into an open space, the ceilings soaring above them.

They’d reached the empty central hall.

Aiden and Lambert each took one of the massive doors and began to shut them while Eskel and Geralt held back the creatures with Aard and bursts of swordplay. Mikel dropped the iron crossbar in place as soon as the doors boomed shut.

Claws scrabbled at the wood and snouts snuffled at the gap beneath the doors, but they held. Geralt and his friends were locked in the great hall with the cursed hordes of the duchy just outside.

“Hard fight to get clear of here,” Aiden said.

“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” Eskel said.

They turned back to the enormous room. It was not as empty as it had first appeared. On the other side of the dance floor was a raised dais and the duke’s throne-like chair. Something scaleless and slimy curled around it like the coils of a mutated snake.

Geralt wiped his sword on his pant leg and began to cross the space. His friends formed up behind him, Eskel on his left and Jaskier on his right, Aiden and Lambert flanking them.

Bile rose in Geralt's throat as he approached the dais.

The duke had been transformed into a wet cylinder of pasty flesh as thick as a man’s torso and long enough to wrap around the chair once. One end of his body terminated in a cluster of sagging appendages set around a gaping, saw -toothed hole.

It was not subtle, but then, sorceresses seldom were.

“A slug,” Eskel said.

The eye stalks rose from their flaccid droop on the arm of the chair and turned towards the witchers.

“Now what?” Lambert asked.

“You must forgive him,” Mikel said, clasping his clawed hands together over his chest.

Geralt glared at him. “How?”

Slowly, the slug straightened from its boneless slouch. The little limbs closest to its mouth began moving frantically.

“This is really, really bad,” Jaskier said. Behind them, the hinges on one of the doors creaked ominously.

“Hmm,” Geralt agreed. He swallowed hard and tried thinking forgiving thoughts. He’d forgiven Jaskier before the bard even finished breaking off their relationship; he’d forgiven Eskel for hiding this contract pretty much immediately after he punched him. 

“Maybe you should hit it?” Eskel asked, clearly following the same line of reasoning. Blood was landing at his feet in quiet little splats.

“Don’t want to touch it.”

“Fair,” Aiden said, swaying on his feet like a drunk man.

The slug finished its slow rise to partial erectness. The mouth parts moved. “Hshh…I am shhorry.”

“Oh gods, that’s worse,” Jaskier said.

“Why?” Geralt demanded. “Why do those horrible things? Why do them to me?”

“My father washhshh a cruel man; he hurtshshed me, as child. Pain washhshh all I knew.”

“Join the fucking club,” Lambert said. “Don’t see any of us torturing people for sport.”

Eskel’s hand came up lightning fast, fingers flying in Axii. “Tell the truth,” he snarled.

The slug’s tail twitched against the floor with splat. “Becaushh it wasshh fun. Becausshh I liked the way it made me feel. Becausshh I could.”

“Let’s go, Wolf,” Eskel said. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Father, please,” Mikel said. He fell to his knees before the slug. “You must know what you did was wrong, it was the basest form of evil. Please, show some remorse, some empathy, I beg you as I have never begged for anything.”

“Ooo, plot twist,” Aiden observed to Lambert.

“Hsshh hsshh,” the slug slurped, “Shh-hhss I am shhorry for what hashhsh happened.”

Geralt pointed his sword that the thing his abuser had become. “You’re sorry for yourself, for getting caught.”

The sound of shattering wood echoed in the hall as one of the doors burst open. Cursed monsters scrambled through the gap like ants swarming out of a drowned nest. They were out of time.

“Shh hshh, forgive me.”

“I can’t.” Geralt let his sword drop to his side. “I fucking can’t.”

Eskel’s hand wrapped around his bicep, pulling him away from the creature on the dais, from the monsters flowing into the hall. “Come on, this way!”

Leaving Mikel on his knees in front of his cursed father, they dove through a passage just off to the side of the throne, slamming the door behind them. A brief flash of gold blinded them as Eskel cast a Quen on the door. Then they were plunged into darkness.

“Fuck,” Geralt said.

* * *

Geralt fell to his knees gasping for air. Their rasping, fast-paced breaths echoed loudly in the complete darkness, one rabbit fast heart and four slower ones beating out a staccato rhythm just audible beneath the yowling of the monsters on the other side of the door. As his panting began to slow, Geralt choked on the thick scent of the room, a mix of dried blood, bodily fluids and what he could only describe as the smell of fear.

“Where…where are we?” Aiden asked, his voice strangled.

Eskel cast Igni and lit a torch set in the wall, filling the room with flickering orange light.

A set of blood-stained, rusty manacles was on the floor in front of Geralt’s knees. He touched the pitted metal with the tip of one gloved finger and the links settled against each other with a quiet clank. His gaze drifted along a trail of dark stains up to a heavy oaken table, and then around to the queerly shaped benches and racks at waist height. His vision doubled, pain-tinged memories overlaying reality and giving the jumping shadows new form.

He was on his knees in the room where the duke had assaulted him.

It was smaller than he remembered, smaller than it appeared in his blood-soaked nightmares. Geralt’s eyes wandered around, skipping over the floggers and whips hung along the walls until they landed on one with a familiar shape, one he recognized from the pattern of scars on his own skin.

“Wolf?” Eskel asked. His tone said this wasn’t his first attempt to get Geralt’s attention.

Geralt looked up at Eskel looming above him. Every movement required twice the time and four times the effort, his gaze dragging up Eskel’s thighs, his belt, his chest incrementally slowly, like he’d been caught in one of Eskel Yrden traps.

Eskel hiccupped and dropped to his knees at Geralt’s side, his heart rate kicking up in a way it hadn’t at any point during the fight.

He was scared.

So was Geralt.

“Fuck.” Lambert said. He collapsed against Aiden, though it was hard to tell who was really holding up who. “Fuckity fuck fucking fuck.”

“Yeah,” Jaskier said. “That just about covers it. Geralt?”

“I’m here,” he said, willing it to be true. He concentrated on the ache of his burning arm muscles, on the sting of a cut across his cheek, trying to push back the darkness tunneling his vision. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t do it.”

Eskel looked around the room. “None of us could have done it. That asshole doesn’t deserve to be forgiven.”

“Can we win? Can we fight our way out of this?” Jaskier asked. Of the five of them, he was the least bloody, but his dagger shook unsteadily in his wobbling hand.

With the long habit of men used to fighting against overwhelming odds under terrible conditions, they turned their concentration away from the nightmarish room and to their dire situation.

Eskel bled sluggishly from a gash that had opened him from hip to shoulder. The pupil of one of Aiden’s eyes wasn’t changing size at his command, evidence of a brain bleed that would be a death sentence for any normal man. Even Lambert, indestructible Lambert, had lost the use of his signing hand at some point, a broken humerus much like the one he’d given Geralt that first miserable winter. Geralt did not appreciate the irony.

“How many potions do we have left?” Geralt asked.

They pooled the little glass vials on the floor between them. They had one swallow and two thunderbolts, not enough to heal their grievous injuries and nothing to boost Eskel’s signs. The door between them and the howling hordes was a thick heartwood, still enforced by Eskel’s brightly glowing Quen, but eventually both would fail. Nothing could hold against a relentless attack forever.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Lambert said.

“We’ve covered that already,” Aiden said.

“We fight in pairs,” Eskel said. “Give the other two a chance to rest.”

“I’m sorry,” Geralt said again, climbing to his feet and taking up his sword. They were going to die here, and an entire region of the continent was going to be wiped out because he had the emotional maturity of a rock troll.

“It was always a longshot.” Lambert kicked at something that rattled.

“Not your fault, Wolf,” Eskel said.

“It’s really not,” Jaskier agreed. “Can I…?” Jaskier stepped closer to Geralt, opening his arms.

Geralt snaked one arm around his waist immediately, pulling Jaskier to his side.

With a groan of effort, Eskel stood as well. “Ok?” he asked as he put an arm over Geralt’s shoulders.

“More,” Geralt said, getting his free arm around Eskel.

Eskel plastered himself against Geralt’s other side, wrapping his arms around Geralt and sweeping Jaskier up in the process.

“More?” Lambert asked. He raised his unbroken arm, hand hovering over one of Geralt’s shoulders.

“Yes,” Geralt said.

Lambert and Aiden both joined the embrace, propped up on each other and wrapped loosely around Geralt’s back, a wall of unflinching muscle (and Jaskier), between him and the world.

Eskel’s Quen flickered and the sound of the monsters clawing at the door grew louder.

“We knew what we were getting into,” Jaskier said into Geralt’s throat.

Aiden yawned. “It’s a good way to die, fighting an army of cursed monsters.”

“Doubt any witcher’s ever put down more than we did, over the past couple of days,” Lambert said.

“Would do it again,” Eskel said.

Eskel’s blood was seeping through Geralt’s mail, warm and tacky. Jaskier’s breath tickled his throat; the bard had tucked his nose into the sensitive skin just beneath Geralt’s ear. A forehead thunked against the nape of Geralt’s neck, Lambert’s or Aiden’s, it didn’t matter much which.

Geralt had failed them so many times, and here they all were, wrapped around him, forgiving him. 

A roar rattled the door on its hinges.

“Werebear? Or maybe an ulfhedinn,” Lambert said. “Something big.”

Geralt looked around frantically for any way out, any weapon that could beat back the tide. With his family crushing close, anchoring him, Geralt saw the room clearly for the first time, the terrible sum of all the pain-causing parts.

This was an elaborate, meticulously designed and expensively outfitted place of torture, positioned just behind the duke’s seat of his power. The man had been a nigh-untouchable, practiced psychopath.

Geralt had made mistakes, from his very first failure to trust his instincts to thinking he could break the curse. But none of this was happening because of Geralt’s mistakes, not really.

Duke Piat had done this to them. Duke Piat had given in to his base nature, to his lust for pain and his impulse to kill, and he’d doomed them all with his depravity.

The Quen barricading them in the room shattered into shards of golden light and Eskel shuddered against Geralt. Wood splintered around sharp claws; a slitted eye glared through a rapidly expanding gouge in the door.

Untangling himself from his family, Geralt shook out his sword arm. Eskel stepped up to his side and matched his feral snarl with a twisted grin. Geralt smashed a too-hard kiss against the ruined corner of his mouth.

“I…you…well, you know,” Eskel said. “I hope.”

“I you too,” Geralt said around the lump in his throat. “All of you.”

“Oh gods, I’m starting to understand you lot,” Aiden said. “Head wound must be worse than I thought.”

Geralt was going to lose them all. Anger burned in his veins, heating him from the outside and pushing away the pain of a dozen minor wounds.

Duke Piat had ended Geralt’s life as he knew it. Geralt hated him for it, a familiar cage of frustration and anger he’d circled for years, only this time the hatred was directed not at himself, but at man who’d done this to him.

The door shattered and an ulfhedinn pushed through the wreckage and into the room. It towered over them, its hairy, spined back brushing the ceiling. Shaking its shaggy head and sending bloody spittle flying, it roared.

Geralt roared back.

Fuck Duke Piat. The man had taken the lives of his vassals, Geralt’s family, and Geralt himself. None of them deserved any of this shit.

Geralt didn't deserve any of this shit.

The air roared, a ululating screech increasing in pitch and volume until Geralt had to drop his weapon and clap his hands over his ears. Eskel’s sword hit the ground beside Geralt’s, but he couldn’t hear the clang above the ear-splitting sound. A feeling of enormous pressure grew in Geralt’s chest, flattening him against the ground.

Just as suddenly as it started, the roaring stopped. The pressure lifted.

Geralt shot a look around at his companions, who were all tentatively uncurling from fetal positions on the floor.

“The fuck was that?” Lambert asked.

The ulfhedinn was gone. A naked, shaking man lay where the creature had stood. He cautiously raised his head, looking down at his own limbs like he’d never seen them before. No new monsters crowded the shattered doorway behind him.

“Geralt, what did you do?” Jaskier asked, leaning against Geralt’s side.

“Uhm,” Geralt said eloquently.

“You forgave him?” Eskel asked. “Right there, in the middle of all that?”

“No. Fuck that asshole,” Geralt spat.

“Hear, hear!” the naked man said.

Eskel laughed. He collapsed against Geralt, the two of them sitting back to back.

“What were the exact words of the curse?” Jaskier asked. “‘Absolution in one who has suffered’, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, tricky,” Eskel said.

“Feel like sharing?” Geralt asked. Through the ringing in his ears, he listened hard to the noises from the hall and heard only feeble stirrings and soft cries of surprise. Human sounds.

“The curse said, ‘absolution in’, not ‘the absolution of’,” Jaskier said.

“I don’t get it.” Aiden hadn’t sat up, was still laying sprawled out on the floor with Lambert’s head resting on his stomach.

“He didn’t have to forgive Duke Piat,” Jaskier said. “He had to forgive himself.”

“Huh,” Geralt said.

“Can’t believe you managed that,” Lambert said after a while.

“Should I not have?”

“NO! I mean yes, you should have!” Jaskier said. “Gods Geralt, don’t doubt it now. I don’t have another three days of monster fighting in me.”

“You never had three days of monster fighting in you,” Eskel pointed out. He elbowed Geralt’s back gently. “Well done, Wolf.”

Several more men appeared in the ruined doorway, clutching their hands over their privates to hide their nudity. Mikel, slightly better dressed in tatters of clothing that hung from his emaciated frame, shouldered his way through them.

“What is this place?” the man at Mikel’s right elbow asked. They were all looking around with undisguised horror.

“The reason we were cursed,” Mikel said.

“Gods,” someone muttered. “We didn’t know.”

Mikel glared around at them. “We knew enough. We knew people were disappearing.”

“Fuckers,” Lambert said, pointing a finger at them from the ground. Several stumbled back in fear.

Eskel snorted.

“Where is he, the monster who did this?” Jaskier asked with considerably more steel in his voice than any of the witchers could have managed.

“The others are sitting on him; we didn’t have anything to tie him up with.”

“Plenty of shackles around,” Eskel waved a hand at the room.

Mikel dragged a set of chains away from the wall and towards the main hall. He stopped to look over his shoulder at Geralt. “Do you want to kill him?”

Geralt tilted his head to the side as he considered. His earlier anger hadn’t disappeared, though it had banked back into something less choking now that the threat of imminent death wasn't hanging over his family. He really wanted Duke Piat to die, but there was a world of difference between striking down a monster in battle and killing a defenseless, naked man. That sounded like something Duke Piat would have been into, and it turned Geralt's stomach.

“I’m no executioner,” he said eventually.

“Really?” Lambert asked. His horror apparently overwhelmed his exhaustion, and he sat up to glare at Geralt.

“Any objection to us killing him slowly?” Mikel asked. His face was blank as stone. 

“Any objection to us looting our way through the castle?” Aiden asked.

Geralt gave him a dirty look.

“What? Someone owes us…something.”

“Take as much as you can carry,” Mikel said. “Sir Geralt?”

Jaskier giggled at the honorific and Geralt swatted his side.

“Hmm,” Geralt said. “He hurt you and your people too. We’ll leave him to your justice.”


	12. Epilogue - Homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An end and a beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Alcohol as a (shitty) coping mechanism, mentions of insomnia and depression. An unreasonable amount of cuddling. 
> 
> Hello my friends! This is it, the last chapter. Thank you for trusting me with these topics. I hope I did them justice. I wrote this whole fic in about 9 days, just sat down and bled on the page until it was done. It was hard to write, harder to live in, the hardest to post. But I'm glad I did. You folks make me glad I did. Let me know what you think, and be well! Take care of yourselves like Eskel takes care of Geralt, yeah?

They executed Duke Piat three days later.

The witchers spent most of the time leading up to the execution eating, meditating, and sleeping in shifts. Aiden took half of their last Swallow and Eskel took the rest, and between that and the dedicated rest time, everyone healed enough to ‘explore’ the castle for amusement. Their pockets might have gotten a bit fuller during their ‘exploration’, but none of them would admit that even to each other, even when they ended up ‘adopting’ two more horses to carry their mysteriously multiplying belongings.

For their part, the villagers burned their dead and took stock of their losses. Naked and partially clothed men trickled into town in twos and threes, gaunt and haunted. Zofia immediately put them to work.

They dedicated much of their time and attention to building a sturdy scaffold in the middle of the square.

“Seems like a lot of work to execute one asshole,” Lambert said, watching as a dozen men put the finishing touches on the looming wooden structure.

“It will stand as a reminder of our failures,” Mikel said. He nodded to the collected witchers as he passed by on his way to the barracks.

The surviving peasantry of the duchy gathered in silence around the scaffold. The witcher family stood behind and a little apart from the crowd, a trio of armored, gold-eyed warriors arrayed around Geralt and Jaskier.

Geralt rolled his eyes at their overprotective formation but didn’t comment. He knew they did it for their own comfort as much as his.

Mikel returned dragging the duke. The curse and his captivity had decimated his body, stealing what little color he had and much of his bulk. His face was reamed with sagging folds of papery skin, his eyes sunken and glassy. He wore torn, stained rags and was shackled at wrist and ankle.

The grinding of the duke’s chains on the cobbles and the endless cawing of the carrion eaters were the only sounds in the square.

When he reached the scaffold, Lena and Zofia took Duke Piat by the elbows and hauled him up the stairs. Mikel followed with an executioners one-edged blade naked in his hand.

At the top of the scaffold, Zofia kicked the back of the duke’s legs. He collapsed onto his knees.

“For the crimes of rape, murder, and assault, you have been sentenced—” Mikel swallowed hard “—to death. Have you anything to say?”

“You can’t do this, boy,” Duke Piat spat. “I gave you life, I gave you a position in the duchy when I should have sent you away to be an acolyte of some forgotten religious order.”

“You made a show of kindness to earn my loyalty and my silence. That does not absolve you of the grievous harm you inflicted on so many.”

“Well said, Your Grace,” Zofia said.

Mikel paled. “I’m not—”

“Even if the legitimate heirs survived, they fled when we needed them most. We follow you,” Zofia said.

Bowing slightly from the waist, Mikel nodded. "Your husband was alderman, can you recommend—"

"Me, obviously," Zofia said, rolling her eyes. 

"Right. Yes. Thank you, alderman."

Zofia tipped her head in the barest of nods before turning away. She and Lena descended from the scaffold side by side.

“Are they holding hands?” Lambert asked, entirely too loudly.

“We’re holding hands,” Aiden said, raising their joined hands from where they’d been mostly hidden behind Geralt. “It’s nice.”

“But we’re…oh.”

“He’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot,” Eskel remarked to Jaskier, who smothered a laugh.

A couple of nearby villagers turned to shush them.

Mikel hadn’t moved. He was still standing on top of the scaffold, looking down at the blade in his hand. Even from fifty yards away, Geralt could see it shaking in his grip. He wrapped his other hand around the hilt to steady it.

“Don’t do this, boy.” Duke Piat raised his hands to Mikel in supplication. “I’m your father.”

“You are a monster,” Mikel said. He raised the sword above his head and held it high. The blade dipped as he faltered. He raised it again, only to lower it once more without swinging.

“Must he do this?” Jaskier asked. “It feels rather like we’re punishing the boy for the sins of his father.”

“He stood by and let it happen,” Lambert said.

“He did save my life.” Geralt reached over his shoulder for his steel sword.

“I’ve got this, Wolf,” Eskel said. He raised his voice. “We claim the right to enact this justice!” His voice rang out across the square, clear and commanding.

The crowd turned towards them, a sea of wide eyes and dropped jaws.

Mikel dropped the sword with a clang. “Our debt to the witchers is immeasurable. Do any object to their claim for justice?”

Silence reigned. An empty path cleared between them and the scaffold.

“Come down from there, Your Grace,” Jaskier said with a beckoning gesture. Mikel stumbled down the stairs.

Eskel, Lambert and Aiden raised their signing hands in one motion, sending a combined blast of Igni spiraling towards the duke. He had just enough time to scream before the pillar of fire consumed him, burning with such an intensity that it sucked the air in the courtyard up into a swirl of heated sparks that flew into the sky above them.

Jaskier’s hand found Geralt’s, his fingers working their way into his clenched fist.

“I have failed again,” Mikel said, joining the witchers as they watched the fire burn.

“The greatest failure would be to allow the cycle of violence to continue,” Jaskier said. “Be a better man than your father, remember and rebuild.”

“Or we’ll be back,” Lambert said, showing Mikel his teeth.

Mikel bowed deeply. He straightened and gestured sharply at the young men standing around listlessly. Within a few moments he had them organized into a work crew. He didn’t look back at the blackened husk of his dead father as he led the men away.

Lambert sighed.

“What’s wrong, Prickly?” Aiden asked, poking his side.

“Prickly,” Eskel repeated with one eyebrow raised.

“Like a cactus. When you shower him with affection, he just blooms.”

“I don’t bloom. I don’t do flower stuff,” Lambert said. “I kill things. Killing is my coping mechanism. And I’m all out of people to kill.”

Aiden held up one finger. “There’s also drinking.”

Geralt ran his fingers through his hair. He’d slept for days and he was still exhausted, his body taunt as a bowstring.

“Let’s try drinking,” Geralt said.

“I like this guy,” Aiden remarked, pointing his thumb at Geralt as he slung one arm over Lambert’s shoulders.

* * *

They raided the barracks for alcohol and found more than enough to drown their sorrows.

Settling into the abandoned home they’d claimed for themselves, they grouped the bottles in center of the kitchen table and the casks next to it. They downed three shots each before they bothered to sit. For a while they drank silently, with the single-minded concentration of men who really wanted to be drunk and had to try hard to achieve it with human alcohol.

Then Lambert let loose an enormous burp that rattled their cups and jolted them into semi-hysteric laughter.

“Gods, even the belching is superhuman,” Jaskier said. “I’m jealous of your projection and your range.”

Aiden grinned, a smug expression that set his eyes to glittering. “You think that’s good, should hear him when I—"

“Don’t you fuckin’ dare,” Lambert said, before planting a sloppy kiss slightly off-center on Aiden’s mouth. “These are my fuckin’ _brothers_.”

Geralt wrinkled his nose at their lip smacking. “Eew.”

“Shut up. You and Eskel are gross too.”

“Well, we are your ‘fucking brothers’, after all,” Eskel said, licking his lips and looking at Geralt the way cats look at cream.

Geralt rolled his eyes. “We are fuckin’ not related.”

“Dunno,” Jaskier said. “You have the same taste in terrible, horrible, no good puns.”

Eskel beamed at the bard, then gave Geralt’s medallion a gentle tug.

“Hmm,” Aiden said.

“Don’t you start with that!” Lambert said with a shudder. “One grunter is enough in the family.”

“Think we know why your medallion reacts to Geralt’s distress,” Aiden said, gesturing to Eskel’s hand on Geralt’s medallion.

“We do?” Eskel dropped Geralt’s medallion. “Why?”

“You and your grabby magic hands, getting chaos all over the place,” Aiden said.

“Hmm,” Eskel said, face contemplative.

“Oh gods, what did I do to deserve these assholes?” Lambert asked the ceiling.

“So, so much,” Aiden said with a grin that aimed at wicked and overshot to fond.

Geralt rapped his knuckles on the table to get Aiden’s attention. “Explain.”

Aiden set down his drink and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Magic is intention. Eskel strokes your medallion with the intention of building a tangible bond, making you feel him. And his medallion is already sticky with that same chaos; it’s shooting out of him all the time, getting spread all over everything he touches, so. Boom. Linked medallions.”

“I’m impressed,” Jaskier said. “You somehow made that really gross.”

“’s not gross,” Aiden argued. “It’s beau—really useful. Wish I could figure out how to do it to Lambert’s medallion, so I’d know if he was in danger.”

Geralt frowned at how…cute…that was. “Think I like you too,” he told Aiden with a sharp-toothed scowl.

Aiden rocked back from him slightly. “Good? Why do you look like you’re about to bite off my nose?”

“Tha’s jus’ his face,” Lambert said.

Eskel coughed to hide his laugh and bent to drag another wine casket up onto the table. Geralt frowned at the duke’s mark burned into the lid just above the tap.

Nudging Geralt with his knee, Jaskier leaned close. “How are you doing?”

A question had been haunting Geralt since they’d broken the curse. He already knew how his brothers would answer, but Jaskier might have a different response.

“Should I have forgiven him?” Geralt asked the bard.

The other witchers stirred, but quieted when Jaskier placed his hand over Geralt’s on the table. 

“Depends,” Jaskier said. “Would it help you?”

Geralt frowned into his wine glass. He would have to bend his own morality in half to forgive the duke. “Don’t think so.”

“Then no. Simple as that.”

Geralt hummed uncertainly.

“We killed the bastard, that has to help, right?” Lambert asked. He squinted at Geralt with eyes that had gone shiny.

“Yeah, ‘course,” Geralt said. He poured another shot into Lambert’s glass. “Of course.”

None of them would be this miserable if killing the duke really fixed anything, but Geralt wasn’t going to cast another shadow over an already dark day by pointing that out. With all the grace and tact of a sledgehammer, he changed the topic of the conversation. “What the hell kind of magic was that Igni the three of you did together?”

Eskel lit up. “So we practiced on the way here…”

They bedded down together for the first time since before they stormed the castle. Aiden and Lambert curled up in a nest of blankets on one side of the kitchen while Geralt, Eskel and Jaskier made a pile of blankets and bodies on the other. Eskel spooned up behind Geralt and Jaskier faced him. Geralt tangled his hands with Jaskier’s and pressed their foreheads together.

“You never really answered me,” Jaskier said quietly. “Today, we killed a man who did awful things to you. How are you doing?”

Eskel’s arms tightened around Geralt. He had wrapped one of his grabby magic hands around Geralt’s medallion and seemed to be concentrating very hard on it.

“Glad he can’t hurt anyone else,” Geralt said.

“But?”

“Doesn’t change much for me, does it.”

“I guess not. But you stopped him. You saved everyone.”

Geralt kissed the top his head. “We did.”

“That’s not what I said. You did this, you insisted we try. You succeeded.”

“I wouldn’t have without you.” Geralt got one hand free and cupped it around the back of Eskel’s fist, giving it a squeeze so Eskel would know he meant them both, them all. Some enemies called for more than one witcher; some called for the whole damn family.

Jaskier was silent for a few breaths. “I have another question. About the night the duke—uh…”

“Gods, Bard,” Eskel said. “Must you poke at every sore point?”

Jaskier shrank in on himself. “I’m sor—”

Geralt growled.

“Right. No more apologies. Sorry—ack.”

Eskel raised his head off his pillow to look at Jaskier over Geralt’s shoulder. “I’m not opposed to more apologies.”

“Hah. Right. Well I am sorry, Eskel. Sorry you almost lost him, sorry for my part in it.”

“Good.” Eskel flopped his head back down on his pillow.

“I know it’s no excuse,” Jaskier said, “But I think I was always waiting for him to leave.”

Eskel swallowed hard. “Me too. And then he did.”

“I am right here,” Geralt said, in part to stop them talking about him as if he weren’t, but mostly because Eskel’s tone made his chest tight. "I always come home to you. You are home."

“Ten minutes,” Eskel said.

“What?”

“I spent ten minutes looking for my shoes, the night you tried to kill yourself. If you had died, I would have always blamed myself for those ten minutes.”

Geralt wiggled, trying to turn in Eskel’s arms to comfort him, but Eskel didn’t let go. With a sigh, Geralt relaxed again. He nibbled on Eskel’s knuckles. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault.”

Jaskier smiled. In the half-light of their dying fire, his eyes were very round. “Sounds very familiar.”

“Shut up,” Geralt told him with no heat.

“Is he always like this?” Eskel asked.

“Yes.”

“Am not…actually, yeah. I am. I’m always like this.”

“Ask your question, bard,” Geralt said, bumping his forehead against Jaskier’s.

Jaskier worried his lip with his teeth. “If Eskel had been there instead of me, would you have still gone into that party?”

Of course not. Eskel would have understood Geralt’s reticence at a glance, wouldn’t have pushed. But that wasn’t on Jaskier.

“It’s me, Jaskier,” Geralt said. “I’m wrong, I’m always wrong.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I always say the wrong thing, react the wrong way. I wanted to be right for you.”

“You don’t have to pretend to be someone you aren’t for me to love you.”

“You don’t know that. I bite people to show affection.”

Aiden snorted from the other side of the room.

“At least pretend you’re not listening,” Eskel said over his shoulder.

“Righto,” Lambert replied with a lazy wave.

“I, uh,” Jaskier sounded like he was blushing. “I’m not opposed to biting.”

Geralt squinted at Jaskier’s face, and yes, the bard was blushing. It was a delicious look on him. Geralt licked his lips and then grinned when Jaskier’s eyes widened.

“Don’t distract me,” Jaskier said. He cleared his throat. “I’m pretty sure I fell in love with the person you’re trying to hide under all that armor. But will you trust me enough to let me find out?”

“Hmm.”

Jaskier’s eyebrows climbed, but he didn’t comment.

“I suppose it’s worth a try,” Geralt said.

“Thank fuck,” Lambert said. “No will you assholes go the fuck to sleep?”

* * *

“Are they always like this?” Jaskier asked.

“Yes,” Geralt said. He leaned a little harder into Jaskier’s side.

“Eh,” Vesemir wobbled one hand in the air. “Sometimes they pretend to have dignity.”

Lambert and Aiden were bouncing off the walls of the great hall while Eskel gave chase, casting precise blasts of Aard at them. Lambert had stolen Eskel’s favorite book out of his lap as they sat reading together around the breakfast table. Now he and Aiden were playing an aggressive game of keep away with Eskel. They scrambled up the walls and into the rafters, then sprinted across them, throwing the book back and forth between themselves whenever Eskel managed to knock one of them off balance.

“You bastard,” Eskel shouted when Lambert dropped a shoe on his head while he was distracted by Aiden.

“It’s nice,” Vesemir said, waving away a bit of dust falling from above. “Reminds me of when we had children running around the keep.”

“Because they are large, lethal children,” Geralt said, heaving an apple at Aiden and making him miss his next step. He tossed the book back to Lambert as he fell, landing in a crouch on top of a nearby bookshelf.

“Oh ‘they’ are children, are they?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt bared his teeth and Jaskier shook his head with a melodramatic sigh.

Eskel gave up and came back to sit in the empty place on Geralt’s other side.

“One of your ‘back room’ books, is it?” Geralt asked, quirking his brows.

“Nah. Elven poetry. They’ll be bored of it—”

“Ugh, what is this, Eskel? You’re so boring.” Lambert plopped down across the table, dropping the book in front of Eskel.

“—Pretty quickly,” Eskel finished.

“What do you think of Kaer Morhen?” Vesemir asked as Aiden rejoined them.

The five of them had arrived to Kaer Morhen late this winter, having spent the last half of the season mopping up the mess at the duchy, frantically clearing the most serious of their remaining contracts, and then travelling hard to beat the snows. As a result, the first few weeks of their stay had been crammed with chores and repairs to prepare for the long, cold nights to come. This was the first time they’d had the leisure to sit in each other’s company.

“There are so many things to climb,” Aiden said, elbowing Lambert’s side as he sat beside him. “Good hunting. Big fireplaces. I like it.”

Vesemir nodded, his face pinching into one of his happy frowns. “And you, bard? What do you think?”

“I. Uh.” Jaskier still danced on hot coals around the eldest witcher. “Your home is very…”

“Cold, broken and hostile?” Lambert asked.

“No, never!” Jaskier said. “It’s hard to capture the weight of a place that looms so large in the memories of a millennia of your kind.”

“That’s literally your whole job.”

“Leave off, Prickly,” Aiden said, scrubbing his knuckles against Lambert’s scalp and ending the discussion.

*

“So what do you really think? Of Kaer Morhen?” Geralt asked later. Jaskier, Geralt, and Eskel were sitting thigh to thigh on top of the keep’s inner wall, soaking up the last rays of the afternoon sun and watching Aiden and Lambert burn off their endless energy in the courtyard below.

“It’s…” Jasker trailed off. He looked around at the ruined castle, his eyes sweeping across the rusty gates, the fallen down towers and the vine covered walls. A thin column of smoke snaked into the sky above the kitchen and Geralt could just detect the scent of bread baking on the wind.

Geralt knocked their shoulders together. “It’s ok if you don’t like it. It’s not an easy place.”

“I love it, mostly,” Eskel said from Geralt’s other side. “It made us…us.”

Geralt turned and nosed the juncture between Eskel’s neck and shoulder, inhaling the leather/iron/magic scent there. “Wasn’t asking you, you romantic sop.”

“No, Eskel’s right. I love it for the strength it gave you and hate it for the pain it caused. I love that the four of you have made something strong out of the devastation,” Jaskier replied. “It’s your home and it’s very much a reflection of you.”

“So. Cold, broken and hostile?” Geralt asked, using Lambert’s words.

“You aren’t broken.” Jaskier poked Geralt’s side.

“You know that’s not true,” Geralt bit off.

Coming home to Kaer Morhen had stirred up memories of his long descent into madness. He’d gone the first three days after their return without sleeping, barely managing to achieve a quiet enough mind to meditate. Eskel had eventually gone to his knees in front of Geralt and meditated with him. With Eskel’s slow breaths and steady heartbeat calming him he managed to find some peace. Then they gathered in the great hall for dinner and all Geralt could think about was all the other times he’d failed to get or keep down meals at this table.

Lambert, Vesemir, and Eskel had squinted at Geralt’s pale face, exchanged speaking looks, and promptly reinstated the careful routines of the previous winter. It worked, righting his wobbling emotional balance so fast he could almost pretend it hadn’t happened. But it still stung to find he wasn’t past all that shit. It still made him uncertain of his own strength all over again.

Eskel twined their fingers together and turned Geralt’s face so he could kiss the tip of Geralt’s nose. “You aren’t broken.”

“You said it yourself,” Geralt argued, focusing on the scarred corner of his mouth. “Some injuries never heal. They just become a part of you.”

Jaskier’s fringe tickled Geralt’s cheek as he rested his chin on Geralt’s shoulder. “Yeah. That’s probably true. Some injuries become a part of you. But you don’t have to become your injury.”

“What?” Eskel asked, leaning around Geralt to look at the bard.

“There’s more to you than your scars, yeah? They don’t define you, stop making that face. They don’t! Not for me, not for Geralt.”

Geralt leaned close and kissed Eskel's scarred cheek. “I like ‘em because they are part of you. Because I…” growl “…you. Every part of you. And the rest of you is so much bigger than the marks on your face.”

“I you too. Every part of you.” He cleared his throat and wiped his free hand across the scarred side of his face, then shook himself and gestured down at his lap teasingly. “And I know I am big.”

“Quit deflecting, we’re having a moment,” Jaskier said, reaching around Geralt to whack the back of Eskel’s head.

Geralt swallowed a chuckle, the quieted when Jaskier wrapped his arms around his waist.

“What happened…” Jaskier said, pausing until Geralt worked up the courage to look him in the eyes, “It’s a part of you, but it isn’t you. You are so much more than one thing that happened to you, no matter how traumatic.”

“Fuck, he’s good. Those are the words,” Eskel confirmed. “I mean, right?”

“Hmm,” Geralt said. He looped one arm around each of their waists and pulled them closer, until the three of them were wrapped around each other tightly, practically in each other’s laps. He burrowed a little deeper into their arms. “If you say so.”

Geralt didn’t quite believe it, not entirely, not yet. But they clearly did. Jaskier and Eskel didn’t see him as a wounded, broken creature. They showed him with every kiss, every embrace, that they believed he was someone worth loving, someone whole. And Geralt was starting to think he would believe it himself someday.

And that was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know if I need to add or adjust tags.


End file.
